"Greek literary studies today may with some justification be compared with a large, thriving, yet still half-unexplored colony. Look at the map. Here are the state highways, confidently marked in red, establishing communications from one boundary to the other: Homer, Aeschylus, Thucydides, Demosthenes, Plato. These roads, and the towns they serve - Homeric Society, the House of Atreus, Solon's Reforms, the Peloponnesian War, the struggle with Macedonia, the Theory of Ideas - we know and travel over regularly. Then there are the minor roads and less-frequented villages: Theocritus, Apollonius Rhodius, Polybius; Hellenistic culture, Alexandrian epic, Greco-Roman historiography. Finally there is the bush, where tenderfoots never venture at all, but where you may find the old professional diggers staking out their claims: Lycophron, Aeneas Tacticus, Diodorus Siculus, Cercidas, Parthenius, and never-dry watering holes labelled 'Unedited Papyri', 'Scholia', or 'Fragments'. Development, we hear, is going on; but the reports from upcountry are generally in code, and for restricted circulation only .
"This is a curious and not wholly beneficial state of affairs. The classical student's reading list is limited - necessarily limited, perhaps - to certain major authors of proven literary excellence; and he is seldom actively encouraged to forage for himself among minor eccentrics, deadbeat pamphleteers, or the lunatic fringe of Alexandrian pseudo-science. This at once distorts his overall picture of Greek civilization and literature alike. Skimming off the cream makes for indigestion; if there is one thing the Greeks have perenially suffered from, it is the deadening myth of perfection. A wider exploration reassuringly dissolves this illusion. ..."
- Peter Green, "The Humanities Today", 1960.
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