From Ancient Rome: A History

[ceebeegee]

...It is estimated that only about five percent of all the compositions of ancient writers actually survives.

Oh, MAN. Five percent. Unbelievable. We are missing out on so much. Why did that stupid fire have to burn down the Alexandrian library, why? Just imagine what else is out there, that we know about because other writers have referred to it, but don't actually have? I feel sick. I feel like Thomasina, the loss of such knowledge literally sickens me.

Can you just imagine how amazing it would be to discover the literary, Greek or Roman equivalent of the Dead Sea Scrolls?

Comments

[carasol.livejournal.com]

Don't feel too bad. The 95% we lost was probably just Harlequin romances and the ancient equivalent of Danielle Steele novels. ;-)

Joking aside, take comfort in Septimus' response to Thomasina's tirade: "We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. we die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march, so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?"

[planga.livejournal.com]

Actually, I was thinking the opposite. What survives would be the most popular literature, due to more copies lying around, or that what was checked out of the library at the time it burned.

In a few thousand years the only things to survive from our time will be Harry Potter and Twilight. Future humans will think we were in the Dark Ages and still believed in this stuff.

Hmm... I wonder if what we consider the Dark Ages is only so because we read their popular literature and assume they were superstitious. Hmm!

[darksheik.livejournal.com]

And man - how advanced a people would we be if we weren't stunted by those thousand or so years...

Stargate played with that concept with the Tollan, an advanced people who left Earth before the Dark Ages.

[ceebeegee.livejournal.com]

What survives (leaving out what was inadvertently lost in the fire) is the result of a complex selection process:

*writers who were deemed bad at the time (eg., Polybius, 2nd c. BC Greek not terribly esteemed by his contemporaries) were left by the wayside
*various works that were considered part of the typical schoolboy curriculum (mainly 5th & 4th c. Athenian writers) were propagated
*Dark Age and medieval clerks also chose certain works to carry forward, which makes you wonder what works survived the fall of Rome which were lost afterward?

[ceebeegee.livejournal.com]

Oh also, the Dark Ages are called that not so much because they were superstitious (they were, but so were the rest of the Middle Ages), but because after the barbarian invasions and the sack of Rome, western civilization kind of ground to a halt. There were no permanent stable cities, no learning--we'd lost track of a lot of the original texts, and the vast majority of people were illiterate (it was the clergy who kept learning alive--in fact we get the word clerk from cleric).

It wasn't until about 1000 AD that cities started growing and thriving again, and it wasn't until the Renaissance started (13th c.), which of course coincided with the rise of humanism, that we rediscovered many of those original sources.

[carasol.livejournal.com]

While having one of our many religion-themed arguments, I pointed out to Damien some of the (probable) mistranslations and inconsistencies in the Bible as evidence that the books had changed over the millennia. He disagreed with that theory, and I pointed out that for centuries, almost all of the knowledge in the Western World was filtered through the Church, and anything that disagreed with their (current) politics was quickly whitewashed away. He still disagreed, and I pointed out that with a 90% illiteracy rate in the general populace, even among royalty, a) recording history was at the mercy of the 10% that could read and write, and b) who would know if changes were made to texts? He still disagreed, so we stopped arguing and got ice cream.

On the flip side, the Dark and Middle Ages did have their intellectuals. St. Augustine was aware that the Earth was round, and wrote about the odds of people living on the other side of it. (He decided there probably weren't any. Guess he wasn't all that much of an intellectual... ;-) )