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Save the Date: Benefactors' Lecture Thursday May 1st 2025

Posted on March 18, 2025 by Lyra McMullen

  • John Gibert and Yvona Trnka-Amrhein

Save the date! This year's Benefactors Lecture will be on Thursday May 1st 2025. Guest speakers Yvona Trnka-Amrhein and John Gibert will give a talk on "Reading and Performing 'The New Euripides'." 

Yvona Trnka-Amrhein and John Gibert, both of the University of Colorado Boulder, will be coming to campus to speak about their translation and publication of a new Euripides papyrus. This papyrus, which was discovered in Egypt in 2022, contains some 100 lines of two previously unknown plays by Euripides, the Ino and Polyidos. While summaries and a few lines of both plays have survived in other sources, the majority of the text represents the most significant new Euripides discovered since the 1960s.

This talk will have two halves. In the first, John Gibert will introduce the papyrus, talk briefly about the challenges of deciphering and restoring it, and focus on three passages with implications for the performance of Ino, the first of the two plays of which extracts are preserved on it. He will discuss the characterization of Ino, the process of arriving at more or less secure inferences about the dramatic situation, and the means by which Ino's rival Themisto may have hoped to get away with the murder of two innocent children.

In the second, Yvona Trnka-Amrhein argues that the reason passages from Euripides Ino and Polyidos were paired on this papyrus is that their eponymous figures were both important Corinthian heroes, despite the fact that the action of Euripides' plays takes place in Thessaly and on Crete, respectively. This type of material would have been useful for the common speech type The Praise of a City, as we can in fact see in Aelius Aristides Corinthian Oration. She will also consider whether this textbook could have been used in 3rd century CE Philadelphia.

Links with information about the discovery:

https://archaeology.org/news/2024/09/04/ancient-greek-text-of-euripides-papyrus-translated/#:~:text=BOULDER%2C%20COLORADO%E2%80%94Artnet%20News%20reports,the%20University%20of%20Colorado%20Boulder.

https://www.colorado.edu/asmagazine/2024/08/01/uncovered-euripides-fragments-are-kind-big-deal

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n18/robert-cioffi/euripides-unbound

Date: Thursday May 1st 2025

Time: 4:30pm

Location: (tenative) Dartmouth 105