Surely It Left Some Ancient Scholar Shaking in His Robe

“If you should erase me, I will slander you to Euripides. Keep off.”

– A warm note scrawled on a papyrus copy of Homer’s Iliad, from sometime between the 1st and 3rd centuries. Talk about an intellectual threat. (Euripides, along with Sophocles, was one of the great Athenian tragedians; why the note-scrawler chose him as an agent of literary vengeance and not, say, Homer is a valid question.)