Time Travelers Never Die - Jack McDevitt [73]
CHAPTER 19
I have drunken deep of joy,
And I will taste no other wine tonight.
—PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, THE CENCI
IT was, Aspasia knew, another manuscript. But this one came in a plain manila envelope with no return address. The date stamp indicated it had been mailed in Levittown, Pennsylvania. First class.
Since she’d won the Athena Andreadis Award for scholarship in classical literature, she’d been awash in manuscripts by people who thought she could help them get published somewhere. Usually, they were Greek family histories of no interest to anyone, but there had been two or three academic gambits of interest. The manuscripts arrived regularly. Sometimes they were book-l ength, with the writer unable to understand why the Oxford University Press had not gobbled it up. Others were commentaries intended for Classical Heritage or Hellenic or Greek Life.
They usually came online. But not always. And there was a tendency among those who used the post office to neglect sending self-addressed stamped envelopes. With the current cost of postage, sending them back was expensive. But Aspasia had never been able to bring herself simply to dump the manuscripts.
She put this one aside, with a couple of bills, and opened the more interesting mail first. A note had arrived from Kingsley Black informing her that his classical literature class had profited from Showtime at Rhodes, her analysis of the reasons for the decline of classical drama. “Excellent book,” he concluded. “Best I’ve seen on the subject.” Well, of course, he would say that, but she had broken new ground. Showtime at Rhodes had been the principal reason she’d won the Andreadis.
Two or three letters took issue with her conclusions, and one quibbled with the dates of two of Aeschylus’s plays. As if it mattered.
Penguin Group wanted a blurb for a Margaret Seaborn book on Archimedes. That would be an easy assignment: Seaborn was always reliable. And the University of Kansas wanted her to speak at their graduation next year.
Eventually, she worked her way back to the manila envelope, which was sealed with tape. It wasn’t too heavy. Not book-length, at least. She couldn’t find her letter opener—Aspasia was not good at putting things back where they belonged—and eventually she had to get a knife from the kitchen.
The envelope did indeed contain a manuscript, but it was in Greek. Classical Greek. And the title startled her: Achilles. By Sophocles.
Someone’s idea of a joke.
There was an accompanying note. Hand-printed.
Jan 26, 2019
Dear Dr. Kephalas:
We have other ancient manuscripts as well. If you’d like to see more, post an English translation of this one at your Web site. If there’s no response within thirty days, we’ll take what we have elsewhere.
No signature.
There was nothing else.
It was, of course, a hoax. And what a pity. Tempting her with one of the lost plays. If only—
She looked at the list of characters. There were five: Achilles, the priest Trainor, Polyxena, Paris, and Apollo. And, naturally, a chorus.
She dropped the note and the manuscript into the trash.
ASPASIA had an afternoon class. It would require some preparation, and she also had to meet with one of her graduate students. A stack of essays waited in a bookcase.
She sighed, retrieved them, and started on the first one. It was an analysis of The Odyssey. The student was trying to show it had been created by a woman. And, in any case, by someone other than the author of The Iliad. Nothing new there.
The second was a commentary on the development of the epic. Its Bronze Age beginnings. Its popularity in the preliterate world. A third essay listed the author’s suggestions for six additional epics to complete the Trojan cycle. Paris makes off with Helen. Agamemnon rallies the troops but has to sacrifice his daughter. And so on.
She wondered if the lost epics had been as powerful as the two that had survived. Most experts thought not. If they’d been lost, the reasoning went, it was because they deserved to be lost.
Nonsense.
How