The Long Journey of Texts Lost Stories, Rediscovered Words, and New Lives of the Classics

What happens to the classics after two thousand years? The Long Journey of Texts explores how classical philology, papyrology, and new technologies recover lost words and give the classics new lives. Across the ancient and modern Mediterranean, from the papyri of Egypt to the carbonised scrolls of Herculaneum, from the myths and emotions narrated by Euripides, Thucydides, and Cicero to Pliny’s Pinna nobilis and the Renaissance reception of the Batrachomyomachia, seven research projects reveal that ancient texts are neither static nor finished: they continue to travel, change, and challenge us.

The exhibition brings together the following contributions:

The Submerged Culture of Palimpsest Manuscripts

Saved from the Fire: The Journey of the Herculaneum Papyri

A New Papyrus from Philadelphia: Euripides’ Long Journey

The Metamorphosis of Myth through Time: Medea Beyond the Text

A Dialogue on Fear: Thucydides and Cicero Compared

Secrets of the Sea: Taranto’s Pinna nobilis from Past to Present

The Manuscript That Brought Frogs and Mice from Greek into the Italian Renaissance