Ides of March: 'Even the Ruins Have Perished'

by Rebecca Stone

fragment of a poem by the Greek poet, Sappho

This year, for the annual Ides of March lecture, PGS welcomed Dr Dirk Obbink, a papyrologist and classicist. Having studied at Nebraska university for a Bachelor of Arts degree in English, Dr Obbink later completed a Master of Arts degree at the same university for Classics and Papyrology. He later received a PhD from Stanford University. After working as a professor at Columbia University in New York, he transferred to Christ Church, Oxford to be lecturer of Papyrology and Greek Literature.

His lecture started, firstly, with some background knowledge of the Ides of March, and the story of the assassination of Julius Caesar. According to Socrates, as he writes a century and a half after the assassination, Caesar died in silence, and, as Plutarch documents, pulled his toga over his face in regret as he saw his ‘faithful’ friend, Brutus, among the conspirators assassinating him. However, others reported Caesar died while uttering the Greek phrase “καὶ σὺ, τέκνον” (“and you, child”). This phrase being the source for Shakespeare’s famous line “Et tu, Brute” in his play “Julius Caesar”.

Dr Obbink then deferred from the subject of the Ides of March and explained the work that was done while excavating the ancient site of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, first excavated by Oxford classics undergraduates, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt. Every winter, starting in 1898, led by Mr Grenfell and Mr Hunt, locals would unearth parts of the ancient site. Part of what they found were scraps of papyrus. They collected these scraps in to baskets and took them back to Oxford, where the two classicists would spend their time fixing these tiny snippets together, to remake what they once were. An outcome of some of these papyri made a letter written to a doctor by a man reporting of an eight-year-old slave who died falling from a balcony while trying to get a better view of an acting group. The letter asks for the doctor to approve of the cause of death so this boy may receive a proper burial.

During a time when modern technology was non-existent, this was a gruelling task and Mr Grenfell and Mr Hunt spent the rest of their lives in the University of Oxford translating and deciphering these papyri. Recently, a programme has been set up online with pictures of the papyrus pieces so that other people may log on to the website “ancientlives.org” and help mark which letters they can decipher. The programme, taking a cumulative answer for what the letters may be, may translate the texts, making the work of papyrologists much easier.

Dr Obbink also explained about the scrolls found in the “Villa of the Papyri”, situated on the coast under the volcano of Vesuvius. The location of this villa to the volcano meant that when Vesuvius erupted in AD79, the 1,800 or more scrolls that were stored there were carbonised by the heat. This means that, due to modern technology, for example CT-scans, papyrologists can decipher what is written in these solidified scrolls, or even carefully unravel a few. For me, the most interesting part of this talk was of the recent find of another poem from the poet Sapho. Sapho was a known for her lyric poetry and is referred to in many accounts by other writers of that time, and after. The poem Dr Obbink showed us described a wish for her brother to return from a voyage safely.

The evening was a great success. Having not known anything about papyrus before the lecture started, the talk was engaging and interesting. I look forward to what next year’s lecture entails.