A new technique has opened up a massive hoard of classical writings:

Quoted from The Independent, 17 April, 2005. Story by David Keys and Nicholas Pyke

 

For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in
equal measure - a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it
could redraw the map of classical civilisation. If only it was legible.

Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of
finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed
infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus
Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies,
tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.

In the past four days alone, Oxford's classicists have used it to
make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by
Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient
world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find
lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the
time of the earliest books of the New Testament.

The original papyrus documents, discovered in an ancient rubbish
dump in central Egypt, are often meaningless to the naked eye -
decayed, worm-eaten and blackened by the passage of time. But
scientists using the new photographic technique, developed from
satellite imaging, are bringing the original writing back into view.
Academics have hailed it as a development which could lead to a 20 per
cent increase in the number of great Greek and Roman works in
existence. Some are even predicting a "second Renaissance".

Christopher Pelling, Regius Professor of Greek at the University of
Oxford, described the new works as "central texts which scholars have
been speculating about for centuries".

Professor Richard Janko, a leading British scholar, formerly of
University College London, now head of classics at the University of
Michigan, said: "Normally we are lucky to get one such find per
decade." One discovery in particular, a 30-line passage from the poet
Archilocos, of whom only 500 lines survive in total, is described as
"invaluable" by Dr Peter Jones, author and co-founder of the Friends of
Classics campaign.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/story.jsp?story=630165

This is really astonishing, a vast new piece of our cultural inheritance, and one whose repercussions will reach far beyond classical studies, spawning interpretation and studies in all the other arts and subtly modifying the cultural ground beneath our feet. It's also a chance for us to examine our criticism; what we find out about these texts over the next few years will say a lot about what our cultural climate is capable of and what we make of our heritage. Will today's classical researchers and interpreters make good use of this material?