Alexandrian Hexameter Fragments

Extract

In the winter of 1900 a number of Greek papyrus fragments came into my hands in Cairo, through one of the most trustworthy of the local dealers. They had to be sorted out from a mass of miscellaneous fragments, with which they had probably been found. The shop was rather dark, and the pieces had not been cleaned; but the hand was clearly literary, and the few words I made out in sorting them over, led me to think that they were, like most literary papyri, Homeric. It was not until some months later, in Oxford, that a more leisurely inspection of them revealed their unusual character, and convinced me of their true importance, as the fragments, unfortunately meagre, of some Alexandrian hexameter poem, no longer extant. A further examination disclosed some curious features, chief among them a system of spelling that seems to mark these pieces as unique among published Greek papyri.