The subway ride to the Upper East Side may be easier than Odysseus’s voyage across the Mediterranean, as long as the 6 train is running. For those who make it, the payoff is substantial: a 2,300-year-old papyrus fragment containing passages from Homer’s Odyssey is now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The museum said this week that the object would come out of long storage on August 5. It is now publicly displayed at The Met in Gallery 162.
In a video released with the museum’s announcement, Séan Hemingway, curator in charge of Greek and Roman art, called the papyrus “the earliest preserved fragment of Homer’s Odyssey that we have today.”
