- It has been claimed that about ten million words of classical Greek and one million words of classical Latin, excepting Christian works, have come down to us. Of the former, two million words are the medical corpus of Galen alone, while of the later about a third is made up of the surviving three quarters of the works of Cicero. In fact, whereas much classical Greek is technical and not of interest to the general reader, nearly all preserved classical Latin is worth reading in its own right.
- So just what proportion of ancient literature has been lost? This is difficult to answer but we can get a rough estimate from the size of ancient libraries. Archaeology suggests that the biggest contained 20,000 or so scrolls and the Great Library of Alexandria itself is most reliably said to have contained 40,000. On the other hand, all the extant pagan classical works would not fill much more than a thousand scrolls so we have been left with about 5% of what might be found (barring repeat copies) in Rome. As for Latin, we have the names of 772 classical authors. Of these, not a word survives from 276 of them. We have fragments ranching from an aphorism to several pages of 352 of the authors. Of the remaining 144, we possess at least one of their works but rarely all of them.
- Some of the reasons that important literature disappeared are in fact very prosaic. The most important was language. When the Roman Empire was at its height the educated classes could read both Latin and Greek but after the fourth century the two languages split on geographical grounds with Greek completely dying out in Western Europe. In the East, Latin was first confined to the army and then disappeared altogether. As late as the thirteenth century the humanist scholar Petrarch could bemoan in a letter to Nicolas Sygeros that he was unable to read any of his collection of Greek manuscripts. Clearly, copying a manuscript that no one understands is not going to be a priority so Latin in the East and Greek in the West was lost.
- This is also the reason for the near total lack of scientific scholarship in Western Europe before the translations into Latin of the High Middle Ages. There never was a scientific tradition in Latin, only popular writings like Pliny the Elder's Natural History. Once Greek died out, these were all that anyone could read and the technical Greek works (apart from one or two like Plato's Timeaus that had already been translated into Latin) were lost to the West.
- Today we regret how much has been lost but we have been remarkably careless ourselves. Many classic television serials, such as Doctor Who from the 1960s, have disappeared because at the time no one felt they were important enough to use up video tape for. Even more tragically, large numbers of early movies like the second part of the incomparable Wedding March (1928) have been lost through carelessness and the perishability of nitrate film (for further details see here). Some surviving classics were preserved in a single print. To those of us who mourn the loss of classical literature this is a depressingly familiar story.
Just as a footnote to the nature of preserved Greek literature: we have a number of texts on Greek music theory by people like Aristoxenus, but almost no actual music. The Greeks lacked a good system of music notation, but they were very interested in the theory of music and that had a significant influence on the later development of Arabic and Western European notions of music theory. I was very amused to read in the introduction to Gustave Reese's book Music in the Middle Ages with an Introduction on the Music of Ancient Times (published 1940 and one of the first books in English on the topic) that when he consulted a classical scholar about ancient Greek music theory he was told to avoid it completely as "that way lies madness!"
Still reading Arthur Rubinstein's autobiography and he just mentioned Stravinsky's Piano Rag Music, the first piece of any importance he wrote for piano and which was dedicated to Rubinstein:
Rubinstein couldn't make much sense of it and didn't play it much. Last night I listened to the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra playing the 1947 Petrushka ballet score by Stravinsky. Excellent performance conducted by Andrés Orozco-Estrada and excellent quality:
Every time I hear that I am astonished at how good the music is.
I didn't know palimpsests had a name or that most of them were originally christian documents, but I have heard internet pagans crying about the practice before.
ReplyDeleteYes, a few documents have been recovered that were hidden under other writings. Right now they are trying to figure out how to read the scrolls recovered from Herculaneum that were completely carbonized. That will be rather a technological feat!
ReplyDeleteAs I noted previously the copying process is what is vastly different in modern vs ancient times. I find it amazng that as many tests were copied and recopied given the intensive labor required and the fragility and storage difficulty of the documents. At least the Sumerians recorded their texts on bricks.
ReplyDeleteWith respect to the Universal fire this is a different issue than the loss of ancient manuscripts. As you noted it was the mastertapes that were destroyed. The music itself survives in countless copies including dupe tapes or digital soundfiles. This is mainly a problem for audiophiles, or in the case of movies videophiles, rather than the average person just wanting to buy a CD, LP or stream some music. In some cases though there may be unused material probably of lesser quality which was never issued and that would indeed be lost.
In terms of ancient texts perhaps I'm being condescending but the ancient scientific and technical texts would mainly be of interest to historians of science rather than scientists. Unlike the arts there actually is cumulative progress in science and many scientific/engineering advances were developed anonymously and adopted by others. So the loss of art is more serious.
When I was a young student in Spain, there were a number of musical scores that were passed around among students. These were of two main categories: special versions of pieces in the repertoire that had never been published such as La Burgalesa by Torroba that was published in F# major but that Segovia had transposed to E major. I had to copy that out by hand and still have it. Another example is a passage in the last movement of the Sonatina meridional by Ponce. Then there were the fingerings, corrections and modifications of Segovia repertoire that one could either copy out by hand or use to correct the published versions. The other big category consisted of arrangements and fingerings by José Tomas, again that often had to be copied by hand. The reason was that this was in the early days of Xerox machines and after a copy had gone through three or four generations, it became a very foggy grey-on-grey and nearly impossible to read. Hence the need to copy it out afresh. What all this represented was the passing on of a great deal of interpretive and technical knowledge from the generation of Segovia and Tomas to us, young students.
ReplyDeleteYou are correct about a lot of the scientific work of the ancient Greeks being long superseded. It was Aristotle that invented from scratch the very existence of physics, botany, meteorology, psychology and so on. Mind you, in the areas of ethics and psychology, I think there is still a great deal to learn from him and Plato, of course.