The UNC Department of Classics presents
Menander’s Tyche and the Fortunes of Ancient Greek Poetry
Anna Uhlig, University of California, Davis
Thursday, 23 March 2023, 5:00pm MU 104
Over the course of the twentieth century – the so-called “century of papyrology” – scores of “new” Ancient Greek poems were unearthed and reintroduced to readers after millennia of obscurity. Perhaps no author has benefited more from this recent change in fortunes than Menander, whose popularity in antiquity rivalled that of Homer and Euripides, but whose works remained almost entirely unknown to modern readers until the early twentieth century. In this paper I will explore some of the conceptual and interpretive challenges and potentials that attend to working on this particular type of “new” ancient text.