Life & Style Magazine Last December, a remarkable discovery in Egypt jogged my memory on two counts. A papyrus found in the abdomen of a 1600 year old mummy at Oxyrhynchus, a city on the Nile, contained a text from Homer’s  Iliad  that described the massive Greek fleet as Agamemnon arrived for the Trojan War. My first memory was of Peter Parsons, a school friend renowned as the finest Greek scholar of his generation. He won just about every prize as a student at Oxford, and became the Regius Professor of Greek there. His lifetime of research centred on the Oxyrhynchus papyri, half a million written texts that survived in the bone-dry rubbish heaps of that ancient city. The name translates as “sharp nosed” and in his book  The City of the Sharp-nosed Fish , Peter drew together tax records, lost plays, personal letters, administration, even biblical extracts, to reconstruct the lives of the inhabitants. My second memory was my first visit to Troy.…