The survival rate of ancient literature

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by the time Greek scholars were fleeing to the West, they had to have someone to flee to, namely an already established humanist culture in Italy which received them. This culture already recovered much of Latin literature, and the only thing the Greeks brought with them from Constantinople were Greek works, e.g. Sophocles and Plutarch. Cicero's works, e.g. letters and essays, were copied by Catholic monks, i.e. "in-house", which explains why so few Roman works survived. An estimate was made that 10 million classical Greek words survive, to 1 million of classical Latin.