The survival rate of ancient literature

[Sean Manning]

As you say, Carlton, many thousands of scrolls and codices were lost. The Library at Alexandria had basically the complete history of Egypt, if we can believe Herodotus, which was accidentally burned in Mark Antony's day.

In How the Irish Saved Civilization, it's pointed out that many of the surviving Classical works are still with us because of just a few people who put in considerable effort and expense to have them copied. Some historic writers allude to other works that are non-existant today. Seems that the conquerors of historical times thought very little about preserving the history of the conquered. They sure weren't considering the problems of modern historical reenactors, now were they? :wink:

Ita amazing to think all the barriers ancient books had to pass to survive to us. I've heard we owe about 75% of our Latin books to the Carolingian Renaissance, and they owed a lot to Ireland and Northumbria. So most Latin literature had been lost by 800 CE, and most of that between say 500 and 800 when few people were interested in secular literature.

But yeah, there are a lot of things to weep over, like all the times someone decided to make another copy of St. Jerome rather than copy something profane like a centurion's memoirs of a war the copyist had never heard of, and rats ate the manuscript before the chance came up again. Or deliberate vandalism, like when one of Charlemagne's successors burned the collection of Germanic oral poetry he had ordered written down because it was too pagan.