Going deeper into my mailbox, I’m finding all sorts of things I meant to post … Back in December, e.g., the Guardian Review had a quiz with questions from various authors, including Mary Beard. Ecce:
1 A “new” poem of which “Greek Muse” was found in 2004, written on the scrap paper packed into an Egyptian mummy – complaining about the onset of middle age, and of knees too stiff to dance?
2 A politician who fell foul of the Emperor Augustus and killed himself – and one of the most famous poets of the 1st century BC. His only poem to survive (celebrating Julius Caesar) was discovered on an Egyptian rubbish dump in 1978. Who is he?
3 2010 saw the first publication of a lost essay by one of the most famous ancient doctors. “On the avoidance of pain” was about the loss of his books in a fire in 192AD and it turned up on a manuscript in a library in Thessaloniki. Who was the author?
via The Guardian Review literary quiz | Books | The Guardian.
If you’re stumped, the answers are somewhere on this page (I confess to having forgotten #2) …
rogueclassicism 