The conclusion of a piece at Salon on the 'discoveries', potential and otherwise (hey GL! they mangled your name! ... it's okay ... they messed up Euripides' too)):

[...] As is usual in such cases, the initial excitement soon became tempered by cooler heads. While the discoveries are no doubt of great excitement to Oxford papyrologists, the surviving papryus is hardly an organized library. Richard Janko, chair of the Department of Classics at the University of Michigan, warned that "whole works are unlikely to come from Oxyrhynchus." Andrew Feldherr, a high school classmate of mine and fellow Latin student who went on to become a professor of classics at Princeton (and who, incidentally, never mangled his sight-read translations for Mrs. Hodges), also expressed caution at imagining the breakthrough might lead to a "second Renaissance" -- as one expert was quoted saying.

Still, the heart beats faster when one imagines fragments of any significance regained from the rubbish bins of history. If one has devoted one's intellectual life to Sophocles, just a few new lines are more than enough grist for a tidal wave of dissertations. And Janko notes that there are other sites where the same technology does hold the promise of uncovering entire works. There are wonders waiting for us.

As Ginny Lindzen, who was excitedly discussing the revelations on a mailing list frequented by classics scholars, said in an e-mail, "SOPHOCLES! When you consider the impact of just one of his plays -- Oedipus Rex -- on western civilization, how extraordinary to think we have something new from Sophocles. It would be like discovering a new Shakespearean play. Better, even. After all, when we talk about Hamlet, we speak of him having an Oedipal complex, don't we?!"

Technological discovery is usually imagined as a thing of the future: new inventions, new cures, new discoveries. But we should never forget that they can also revivify the past. The scanning technology researchers at Brigham Young University, led by Steven and Susan Booras, are my new heroes, shining a telescope into the distant sources of Western civilization.

Lindzen, an advocate for Latin teaching who chairs the Committee for the Promotion of Latin at Porter Middle School in Austin, Texas, brought the relevance of using new technology for ancient purposes all the way back around to my beloved Latin teacher, when she noted that classicists are often among "the first to grab new technology and put it toward good use."

"Latin online libraries were created so that teachers everywhere could teach not just the authors in their books, but anyone they chose whether they had a text or not. Often the first people at a school to jump on new technology are the Latin teachers, who are forever striving to keep their field from being cut."

The Internet was hardly more than a gleam in a geek's eye in the mid-'70s, when I was studying Latin, and certainly, the idea that technologies originally developed for satellite photography would discover "new" works by Sophocles or Euripedes was not something that Mrs. Hodges would have imagined. But I know exactly what she would say, if she was still around for me to tell her the news. Her eyes would twinkle, and she would intone: "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever."

Elsewhere at Slate is a brief disquisition on the technology .... and just to show that the 'telephone game' still works, check out the headline of Webindia's coverage of the story ....