Fata libellorum

Among the remarkable surprises offered by the Archimedes Palimpsest there is one in particular that prompts my choice of topic: the discovery of parts of two speeches by Hyperides as the lower text in five bifolia of the prayer book, announced by Natalie Tchernetska in ZPE in late 2005. 1 Until this identification was made, the scholarly consensus was that Hyperides was one of the many casualties of late antiquity, that despite his eminence as an orator spoken of for centuries in the same breath as Lysias, Isocrates, Aeschines and sometimes even Demosthenes, and despite his prolific output and the survival of some of his works in papyri, along with many quotations and other testimonia, 2 he failed to survive long enough to be copied in minuscule, unlike significant parts of the rest of the work of the so-called ‘Canon’ of Ten Orators.