A Sapphic Scandal and Scholarly Ethics

When Dirk Obbink announced in January 2014 that he had discovered two new poems by Sappho on a recently surfaced papyrus fragment, the news caused a media frenzy and an outburst of scholarship on the new texts. In the decade since the announcement, however, scholarly scrutiny of the papyrus itself – as an archaeological object – has exposed the published accounts of its origins as bogus. Amazingly, the publisher Brill even retracted formally one of Obbink’s publications on the topic – a virtually unheard of event in the world of Classical scholarship. In this paper, I present the history of the discovery and the forensic exposure of the papyrus’ illicit origins before turning to the larger issues of research ethics in Classical scholarship and the importance of provenance research for the field in general – outside of exclusively archaeological circles.