Publisher's Synopsis
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.
