Alas, this sort of thing is all too common … from a piece by Harry Mount on student howlers:

In 19th-century Oxford, Gladstone may have been studying algebra, hydrostatics and Herodotus but he had some pretty dim contemporaries; like the classicist who’d miscopied a friend’s essay on Greek tragedy.

“Who’s this Bophocles you keep referring to?” said his tutor. “Surely you mean Sophocles?”

“Well, it says Bophocles here,” said the student, pointing at the essay.

A lot of the modern mistakes are, like the Bophocles incident, just slips of the pen.

• Never mind GCSEs, judge students by their howlers (London Evening Standard)