Page "Alcaeus of Mytilene" Paragraph 69

The story of Alcaeus is partly the story of the scholars who rescued his work from oblivion.

His verses have not come down to us through a manuscript tradition-generations of scribes copying an author's collected works, such as delivered intact into the modern age four entire books of Pindar's odes-but haphazardly, in quotes from ancient scholars and commentators whose own works have chanced to survive, and in the tattered remnants of papyri uncovered from an ancient rubbish pile at Oxyrhynchus and other locations in Egypt: sources that modern scholars have studied and correlated exhaustively, adding little by little to the world's store of poetic fragments.