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This chapter examines the significant papyri find in the ancient St. Arsenius monastery in Tura, which yielded a wealth of writings in Greek from one of the most prominent heads of the Theological School of Alexandria, Didymus the Blind. Didymus has rarely received the scholarly attention one would expect for someone with such a high reputation in antiquity and with such a prodigious output of texts to study. His legacy in historiography has been affected by the perception that he is either an unoriginal thinker or a heretic. In both his commentaries and his treatises, Didymus defends Christianity and his definition of orthodoxy in debates with pagan philosophers and “heretics.” However, the ideas he developed in defending Christianity (such as allegorical exegesis) were the very things by which his ideas were judged heresy after his death by the Greek and Roman churches.

This chapter recounts the author's participation in the Egyptian excavation site in Tura. The name Tura is notorious in all of Egypt. A few kilometers south of Cairo lies the state prison where political opponents of the regime were tortured and abused, often enough to death. Its inmates were required to labor in the limestone quarries that supplied the nearby cement plant. In the winter of 1977, the cement plant wanted to expand. The new building site extended into the ancient stone quarries. Before the extension could proceed, however, the new site had to be explored for possible archaeological remains and excavations undertaken wherever something looked promising.

Leonello d’Este is known to scholarship as a prince with a real interest in humanism, although he was also a vernacular poet of considerable wit, and a musician. This chapter examines images made for him in connection with his studiolo in the villa of Belfiore, including paintings by Angelo da Siena, Tura, and others, and medals by Pisanello. In these images, Leonello’s interests in humanism, poetry, and music are brought into striking alignment, and this chapter argues that through them Leonello constructed himself as a divinely inspired vates singing his verse to his “lyre”—although, importantly, one whose muse was distinctly Ovidian and playful in character, connected with the figure of Eros. Further, this chapter goes on to suggest that the identity assigned to the lutenist Pietrobono by Leonello, his first employer, made of him the perfect facilitator of the marchese’s own musico-poetic persona.