How to complete a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle with only 10 pieces in the box? It's everyday reality for classicists, given the fragmentary nature of the world we study. Bits and pieces thankfully stood the test of times, but others are inevitably missing. How to deal with these incomplete puzzles?
Read here how Matthew Payne - following in the footsteps of Joseph Scaliger - studies the most fragmented of fragments: individual quotes and citations from long lost works of literature.