Nikolaos Gonis – författare

Papyri nos 5404-5476 P. Oxy LXXXIV marks a new departure for the series: it is the first to publish texts in Egyptian. One is a Greek-Coptic paraphrase of Homer's Iliad, the other a sale of house property in Demotic accompanied by a Greek tax receipt. Section I presents extensive remains of a set of codices of the Septuagint. Section II includes a miscellany of new literary and subliterary texts: remnants of post-Classical hexameter poetry, a possible fragment of Middle comedy with an Anacreontic theme, and a cento of Homeric verses on the myth of Daphne. The seventeen papyri of Apollonius Rhodius published in Section III, providing some two dozen variant readings, confirm the Argonautica's status as the most popular epic poem in Roman Egypt after the Homeric and Hesiodic classics. The papyri of Apollonius are complemented by a painting of a wheeled float carrying the Argonauts, perhaps an llustration of a local spectacle. Section IV publishes the remaining (readable) declarations of livestock so far identified in the collection; and the largest number of accounts published from the 'Apion archive' since vol. XVI, a focus of intensive debate in the last two decades. The global figures for the estate's income, expenditure, and tax payments in the new texts offer fresh 'hard data' to steer and inform this lively discussion.

This volume contains the first editions of 55 Greek literary and documentary papyri. The theological texts include fragments of Genesis and Luke, both assignable to the third century. Pride of place among the new literary texts is given to a retelling of Egyptian mythology, in which Isis writes to Arianis, appealing for his help in locating the body of Osiris. Two others are philosophical (Peripatetic and Stoic). Among the extant classical texts, large fragments of Plato's Laches offer readings of particular interest. A paraphrase of Justinian's Digest shows a professor explaining the relationship between written law and custom in a mixture of Greek and Graeco-Latin. The documents include a group of ten private letters and an elaborate first-person account of a failed attempt to buy camels for the state.

The volume continues the publication of The Rendel Harris Papyri (vol. I, 1936; vol. II, 1985), offering editions, with translations and interpretations, of eighty-one Greek papyri. Three are literary or subliterary, the others documentary. With a few exceptions, the texts included are from Oxyrhynchus. They range in date from the early first to the late seventh/early eighth century, but the majority come from late antiquity, with about twenty of them dating from the fifth century.