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

Comments

[carasol]

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]

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]

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]

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?