The survival rate of ancient literature

[Theodosius the Great]

OK, my last post here, I promise :

I think it should be added that the widespread late antique practice of creating concise summaries of lengthy works like Livius' paradoxically reduced the amount of ancient literature, as they took the incentive away to read (and copy) the original works. Sad to see how a well-intended idea worked so counter-productive in the long run.

Indeed, that phenomenon continued well into the Renaissance ! It also happened with both Isidore of Seville and Willem van Moerbeke's translations.

That has more to do with modern Western science. There is actually a lot of source-material around that is not translated into English, but which is available in Russian and occasionally in German. But how far back that goes I don't know. A lot of ancient Persian material was destroyed I think because the Sassanids fought a lot harder and longer against the Arab invaders

I meant any pre-Islamic, Persian / Parthian authors. For example, a Persian "Tacitus" or a Parthian "Livy" .

Well, it has to do with the thread, because it is a reason for the people of the time to decide what to copy and what not to copy. If the Church frowned on, say, Plato or Aristotoles, that would mean their manuscripts were not reproduced? Not destroyed, but not replaced either?

A possibility, sure. But ultimately they're unanswerable questions. Who can know now what was lost and when it was lost ?

But that's entirely different! Van Moerbeke was one of the clerics attached to the Latin Kingdoms who conquered and effectively destroyed the Byzantine Empire in the 13th century. he worked with the sources preserved by the Byzantines before the new Latin master took them by force.

OK, but no time period was specified in your question. Nevertheless, our clean, modern translations of many Greek works are solely due to his efforts.

He must have been watering at the mouth to find all that stuf, which for so long had been unavailable in the West, hidden or at least not made available by the Byzantines.

Ah, proving that there was a thirst for rediscovering and preserving classical knowledge within the Latin Church's ranks. It sounds like we agree ?

Not proof, as I asked, of Greek scholars supposedly fleeing to the west with a bundle of Classic manuscripts hidden in their baggage, which they then supposedly brought to the Catholic church to have it copied.

The Greek refugees fled from their doomed Capital in the 15th century - making them the last generation of the Roman Empire.

Here's a nice, long list of [size=150:26h6ts3v]Renowned Byzantine Scholars[/size]
At least one of them, Henry Aristippus, is from the mid 12th century.

One more item : it's not wholly accurate to say that Western contact with Constantinople was minimal, IMO. Recall that the Venetians always maintained strong commercial ties to the Empire. And Rome remained in Byzantine hands long after the Gothic Wars of the sixth century. At a whim the Emperors could (and did) remove and install Popes at their pleasure just as they did with their Patriarchs in Constantinople.

Please, please, tell me you did not fall for the Fjordman report or similar writings

The most reputable scholars I've read are Bernard Lewis, Warren Threadgold, and Victor Davis Hanson. I'm sure they all have detractors - who doesn't these days ? I'll leave the matter there.

I raised the question earlier in another thread: How did the Persians view the Romans
In my impression the loss of ancient Persian literature was partly due to later Islamization (somehow analogous to the Christian bias in the West against the classical heritage), but much more the Persians did not have historiography in a true sense of the word.

We should not forget that historiography a a critical science was only introduced two times in history, by the Greeks in the 5th century BC and by the Chinese around 100 BC. All other historiographical traditions are either from a much later period or adopted from the Greek model (in the Far East from China: Japan & Korea).

Thank you, Stefan. I, too, thought I remembered reading that historiography was a Greek practice adopted only by the Romans and one or two other Far Eastern civilizations (independently from the Greeks, of course).

I sure did! It sounds like under 1% and maybe about 0.1% of ancient literature survives.

:lol: That figure sounds suspiciously precise and confident. Like I said, who now can possibly know what was lost and when.

But I really don't know how much the Latins copied from the Greeks, how much they stole from them, and how much turned up in obscure libraries across western Europe when the Italian humanists started looking for texts in Greek.

If you're interested, please see the list of Byzantine scholars I posted above. It's a good place to start.

Endre,

Bit to late to contribute much ... The "study of greek studies" in the latin medieval west have in recent years undergone a bit of a revision from the old setup; it seems far more was available than was believed 50 years ago. But of course that has already been stated here earlier in the thread.

Thank you for these links. I'm sure these books can shed a lot of light on the subject. It's always good to keep up with the latest scholarship.

~Theo