Re: Classical antiquity to the Middle Ages: Continuity or Discontinuity?

On 10 Apr, 13:06, Sigge <Riace.Warr...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I checked your pages at tertullian.org. You are performing a  job that
the librarians of Alexandria would applaud. Nothing, however stupid
and worthless for the Humans, should go unexamined.

Thank you for your kind words. My opinions have no great value. But
any of us can do something useful, if we just upload to the web things
that we find interesting which are not already online.

I must express my personal feelings about the Works of the ancients.
I am sure that they are shared by the majority of the Civilized
people. I have a feeling of enormous LOSS.

Me too. Pietro Bembo estimated the loss of ancient literature at 99%;
N.G.Wilson has repeated this figure, which is as good as any.

Some of this literature was undoubtedly already lost by the end of
antiquity. The compiler of the Theodosian Legal Code, in 451, laments
that he was unable to find more than abbreviated versions of the works
of 2nd century jurists such as Ulpian and Papinian.

The structural change of Roman books from the fragile papyrus roll to
the sturdier parchment codex, in the 3-4th century, was a good thing,
but of course it meant that any literature that was not so copied was
automatically lost soon afterwards. Our survivals of first century
literature reflect the fashions in reading at the end of the 4th. The
lack of survivals from the 2nd and 3rd reflects, no doubt, their
relative unpopularity.

I would give all my fortune to see on the stage
one of Sophocles' trilogies, that seem to be irretrievably lost.
To read during the afternoon some of the erased (forever?) poems of
the Sappho.

Weren't some rediscovered recently? You never know what might still
be around...

Your Church Fathers are partly responsible for this enormous LOSS.

Um, the Church Fathers of Byzantine Greece sponsored a **classical**
school education. Sophocles exists because they wanted his plays read
in the schools. This was pretty large-minded of them, surely? Even
letters of Julian the Apostate? (Although, in fairness, paganism was
utterly dead and what they wanted was the Attic style.)

All the best,

Roger Pearse

.

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