Researchers in Egypt discovered a 1,700-year-old school with its walls covered in Greek texts referring to a passage about drugs from The Odyssey. The school is located in the ancient town of Trimithis, now called Amheida, in Egypt’s western desert.
Although the existence of the village has been known to researchers since the 1970s, a recent journal article by the New York University professor of classics, Raffaella Cribiore, has drawn attention to the school and its Greek graffiti.
As reported, several walls of the three room building bear handwritten Greek inscriptions. In the main room there is a five-column text, written in red link in perfect elegiac verses that urges students to climb the hill of rhetoric with the help of Hermes, ancient Greece‘s god of rhetoric, and of other deities. In a second room, researchers discovered a passage from The Odyssey referring to a drug which Helen of Troy gave to her guests. On a different wall researchers found a passage from Plutarch regarding an ignorant king who preferred the neigh of his horse rather than the music of a famous flute player.
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