The survival rate of ancient literature

[Carlton Bach]

I'm not sure anyone can give you any good answer to that, but the loss must have been considerable. If I had to quantify it, I would say less than 1% is the more likely figure. We know from our sources that libraries with tens of thousands of volumes were not unusual in the Hellenistic amnd Roman period. Even if we assume that the majority of the text in them would have ocverlapped (Antiquity had a literary canon that would have determined what belonged in every library), we can confidently assume the existence of at the very least a high five-figure number of discrete works. By the Roman period, the literary output even of minor philosophers (many of which made a living by writing and going on the 'literary circuit' for their wealthy patrons) probably exceeded in volume that of Aristotle or Plato. Poets and playwrights were a dime a dozen in Rome and Alexandria. Many educated men produced literature either for their own entertainment (and to play in the literary games of one-upmanship that kept their circles busy) or to gain the patronage of the powerful. Panegyrics and speeches were composed for all kinds of occasions, and many were preserved either for their historic significance, genuine quality, or the vanity of their authors.

What we have is a small part of the output of the people who were considered genuine classics, and sometimes not even that. By way of an example consider Vitruvius: a moderately successful architect in the service of Julius Caesar and Augustus who wrote a scholarly book on architecture after his retirement, he cites numerous widely read and sometimes centuries-old classics of his field. He was not a famous man in his time and can not have been the only writer on architecture in his era, either. Yet his is the only text to survive *at all*. To the Renaissance, he became a kind of demigod of builders simply because he was all there was.