Most people are aware that the vast majority of everything that was written in ancient times has been lost. Some languages, however, have more surviving works than others. To give a somewhat extreme example, the Roman writer Pliny the Elder (lived c. 23 – 79 CE) records in his Natural History 18.5.22 that the city of Carthage contained libraries of scrolls written in the Punic language. In 146 BCE, however, the Romans utterly destroyed Carthage. They burned the entire city to the ground and killed or enslaved every single person who lived there.
The Romans dispersed whatever survived of the contents of the Carthaginian libraries among the various kings of North Africa—except, Pliny tells us, for a treatise on agriculture written in a set of twenty-eight scrolls by the Carthaginian writer Mago, which the Senate ordered be translated into Latin. The Latin translation of Mago’s treatise was later lost and is only known today from references in Greek and Roman sources. The Punic language itself went extinct sometime around the fifth century CE. As a result, not a single literary work that was originally written in the Punic language has survived to the present day complete; even the works that are known are known only in name, summary, or fragmentary quotation.
Ancient texts written in the Greek and Latin languages have been relatively fortunate in terms of their survival. Scholars often estimate off-the-cuff that around 1% of the known works written in Greek and Latin in ancient times has survived to the present day. This may not seem like a lot, but it is still far more writing than any individual can possibly hope to read, even in a lifetime, and it is a great deal more than what has survived in Punic. Given these circumstances, it is only natural that many people are curious which of these two languages has more surviving ancient texts: Greek or Latin? The answer, for reasons I will explain shortly, is almost unquestionably Greek.
Much more surviving Greek than Latin literature
There is an easy, if imperfect, visual demonstration of how much more ancient literature has survived in Greek than in Latin. The Loeb Classical Library is a series of books published by Harvard University Press that includes most canonical works of “classical” Greek and Latin literature. According to this article from Books and Designers published in 2013, at that time, the series included 520 volumes, but a few more have probably been added since then.
Each volume of the series takes the form of a facing-page translation. On the left-hand page is the Greek or Latin text of the work that is contained within the volume. On the right-hand page is a fairly literal translation of the text into English prose. Volumes primarily containing texts originally written in Greek have green covers and volumes primarily containing texts originally written in Latin have red covers.
Virtually any university library worth its salt will have a complete set of the Loeb Classical Library somewhere in its collection. For instance, the Herman B. Wells Library at Indiana University Bloomington has a complete set in the Reference Room on the ground floor. If you find a complete set somewhere, you will immediately notice that there are nearly twice as many volumes with green covers as there are volumes with red covers.
Admittedly, the Loeb Classical Library does have some significant omissions. Notably, its coverage of the Christian church fathers is very incomplete, since the series arbitrarily includes some of the major church fathers, but not others.
In these cases, however, the series actually tends to favor inclusion of Latin authors over Greek. The series notably includes works by the Latin-language Christian authors Tertullianus, Marcus Minucius Felix, and Augustine of Hippo, but does not include any works by the equally significant Greek-language Christian authors Ioustinos Martys, Eirenaios of Lugdunum, Origenes of Alexandria, Athanasios of Alexandria, or Ioannes Chrysostomos.
ABOVE: Photograph I took myself of the complete set of the Loeb Classical Library in the Reference Room in the Herman B. Wells Library at Indiana University Bloomington. (A few volumes are missing here and there because they have been removed and they haven’t been reshelved.)
Much earlier beginning of writing in Greek than in Latin
There are a number of factors that have contributed to there being more surviving ancient texts written in Greek than in Latin. The first factor is that the Greeks began writing in Greek long before the Romans began writing in Latin and people who know the Greek language have continued writing in forms of it continuously until the present day.
To explain, I suppose it makes sense to go back to the beginning. Sometime around 1600 BCE or thereabouts, the Mycenaean civilization arose in mainland Greece. The Mycenaeans spoke an archaic form of the Greek language known as Mycenaean Greek and they wrote a number of documents in this form of Greek on clay tablets in a syllabary writing system known as Linear B. These are the very oldest documents written in the Greek language that have survived to the present day.
Unfortunately, the only people who seem to have known how to write in Linear B were a relatively small number of elite specialist scribes who worked in Mycenaean palaces. All the surviving texts in Linear B are administrative documents written by these scribes. Sometime around 1200 BCE or thereabouts, the Mycenaean palace system that supported the scribes collapsed. As a result, people no longer worked as scribes and the Linear B writing system was totally forgotten.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a clay tablet with writing on it in Linear B, recovered from the archive of the Mycenaean city of Pylos
For about four hundred years after the Mycenaean collapse, there are absolutely no surviving texts written in the Greek language. Then, in around the eighth century BCE, the Greeks adopted a form of the Phoenician alphabet, which they adapted to suit their own language. This became the Greek alphabet.
The oldest surviving inscription written in the Greek language using the Greek alphabet may be the Dipylon inscription, a short inscription scrawled on an oinochoë, or wine vessel, that was discovered in the Dipylon Cemetery in Athens. This inscription is thought to date to sometime around 740 BCE or thereabouts.
The oldest surviving works of literature in the Greek language that have survived to the present day are the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the poems of Hesiodos of Askre. These poems were most likely originally composed for oral performance in either the late eighth century BCE or the early seventh century BCE, relying on older oral poetic traditions.
Archilochos of Paros (lived c. 680 – c. 645 BCE) is probably the earliest Greek lyric poet who has any writing that has survived to the present day. Sadly, his work survives only in fragments. (I previously used him as an example in this article I wrote in May 2021 to illustrate how very early Greek literature was sometimes shockingly obscene.)
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Dipylon inscription, dating to c. 740 BCE
The oldest surviving writing of any kind in the Latin language is the inscription on the Praeneste fibula, which most likely dates to the seventh century BCE. The inscription in extremely archaic Latin reads:
“MANIOS MED FHEFHAKED NVMASIOI.”
This means, in English:
“Manios made me for Numerios.”
Thus, the earliest writing of any kind in Latin dates to roughly a thousand years after the earliest writing of any kind in Greek and maybe around a hundred years after the earliest writing in Greek using the Greek alphabet. Moreover, by the time of the oldest known menial inscription in Latin, many noteworthy works of Greek poetry that have survived in writing had probably already been composed, including the Iliad, the Odyssey, the poems of Hesiodos, and probably the poems of Archilochos. At this point, though, no one was writing literature in Latin.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Praeneste fibula, which bears the oldest surviving inscription in the Latin language, dating to the seventh century BCE
The early flowering of Greek literature
The fifth and fourth centuries BCE are traditionally considered to have been the golden age of classical Greek literature. These centuries produced the tragic playwrights Aischylos, Sophokles, and Euripides, the comic playwrights Aristophanes and Menandros, the historians Herodotos, Thoukydides, and Xenophon, the philosophers Plato, Aristotle, and Theophrastos, the orators Lysias, Demosthenes, Aischines, and Isokrates, the medical writers of the Hippokratic Corpus, and literally hundreds of other authors, some of whose writings have survived to the present day.
King Alexandros III of Makedonia (ruled 336 – 323 BCE)—or, as he is better known in English today, “Alexander the Great”—conquered the entire Achaemenid Empire, including diverse lands spanning from Greece to northwest India. After Alexandros’s death in 323 BCE, his empire fragmented into a number of kingdoms, which were heavily influenced by Greek culture and ruled by various Greek monarchs. This marks the beginning of a historical era that is known as the “Hellenistic Period.”
During this period, Greek became the dominant language and lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean. Many authors who were not Greeks themselves wrote works of literature in the Greek language. For instance, the Egyptian writer Manethon (fl. c. late fourth or early third century BCE) and the Babylonian writer Berossos (fl. c. early third century BCE) both wrote works in the Greek language about the histories of their respective peoples. Portions of both these histories have survived.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Hellenistic-style portrait head of an unknown priest of the Greco-Egyptian god Serapis dating to between c. 230 and c. 240 CE, now held in the Altes Museum in Berlin
The earliest literature in Latin
It is only after all this that Romans and people in the Roman cultural sphere began to produce the earliest known literature in the Latin language. The earliest person who known to have written poetry in the Latin language is Livius Andronicus (lived c. 284 – c. 205 BCE). Only fragments of Livius’s works have survived to the present day, but historical sources record that he primarily wrote plays that were based on earlier Greek plays.
The earliest Roman author who has any works that have survived to the present day complete is the comic playwright Titus Maccius Plautus (lived c. 254 – c. 184 BCE), who wrote twenty comedies that have substantially survived to the present day, as well as many other comedies that have either been completely lost or survived only in small fragments.
Thus, by the time anyone even started writing literature in the Latin language, the Greek language already had a vast and varied literary corpus, which included (among other many things) epic poetry, lyric poetry, tragedy, comedy, history, philosophy, political theory, oratory, and medical texts.
ABOVE: Image from this website of a woodcut made by the workshop of Michel Wolgemut in 1493 showing how he imagined the Roman comic playwright Plautus might have looked (No one knows what he really looked like.)
Greek literature written simultaneous with Latin literature
Greek literature had a roughly four-hundred-year head start over Latin, but people did not stop producing literature in the Greek language after people started producing literature in the Latin language.
Indeed, some of the most prominent authors who wrote in the Greek language lived during the time when Greece was ruled by the Roman Empire. These include the historians Diodoros Sikeliotes (lived c. 90 – c. 30 BCE), Dionysios of Halikarnassos (lived c. 60 – c. 7 BCE), Arrianos of Nikomedeia (lived c. 86 – c. 160 CE), the biographer and Middle Platonist philosopher Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c. 46 – after c. 119 CE), the orator Ailios Aristeides (lived 117 – 181 CE), and the Syrian satirist Loukianos of Samosata (lived c. 125 – after c. 180 CE).
As I previously mentioned in this article I wrote in September 2019 about what language the Romans spoke, even some Romans who spoke Latin as their first language chose to write their literary works in Greek because Greek held greater literary and philosophical prestige than Latin. Most famously, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (lived 121 – 180 CE) was born in the city of Rome and spoke Latin as his first and native language, but yet he wrote his philosophical notes, which are best known today by the title Meditations, in Koine Greek.
Less famously, Klaudios Ailianos (lived c. 175 – c. 235 CE) was a Roman orator who was born in Praeneste, the very city in the heart of Latium from which the Praeneste fibula takes its name. Like Marcus Aurelius, he almost certainly spoke Latin as his first language, but yet he chose to write exclusively in Atticized Greek. His surviving works are Variegated History and On the Nature of Animals.
As a result of this, it is only natural that people in ancient times produced significantly more literature in the Greek language than in the Latin language.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius in the Musei Capitolini in Rome
Better rate of preservation for Greek texts in the manuscript tradition
In addition to the fact that ancient people produced more Greek literature than Latin literature in the first place, a greater percentage of the Greek literature that was produced seems to have survived to the present day. This is largely due to the differing locales in which ancient Greek and Roman texts were copied throughout the Middle Ages, which I discuss in greater depth in this article I wrote in January 2020, citing Anthony Kaldellis’s book Byzantium Unbound, which was published in 2019 by ARC Humanities Press.
Most of the works of ancient literature written in Greek that have survived to the present day have survived because they were copied throughout the Middle Ages by scribes for the sake of educated people in the Byzantine Roman Empire who could read Greek.
Meanwhile, most of the works of ancient literature written in Latin that have survived to the present day have survived because they were copied throughout the Middle Ages by scribes for educated people in western Europe (i.e., “Latin Christendom”) who could read Latin. In both cases, many (but not all) of these scribes were monks and many (but not all) of these educated people were clergy of some variety.
For most of its history, the Byzantine Roman Empire had a highly centralized government and a thriving class of educated urban elites who were primarily, but not exclusively, centered in the city of Constantinople. Western Europe had educated elites too, but the Byzantine Roman Empire, in general, had more institutional and organizational support for the copying and studying of classical texts.
ABOVE: Byzantine Roman manuscript illustration dating to the mid-tenth century CE depicting Matthew the Apostle with scribal equipment of that era
We can see the gap in preservation between Greek and Latin literature perhaps most clearly in the genre of history. Herodotos and Thoukydides are generally considered to have been the most influential early figures in the development of the Greek historiographical tradition.
All the works that Herodotos and Thoukydides are known to have written have survived to the present day in more-or-less the state of completion in which they seem to have left them. (Thoukydides does not seem to have ever finished writing his Histories of the Peloponnesian War, since the work ends mid-sentence in the middle of the war and multiple ancient historians, including Xenophon, wrote continuations of it, picking up from exactly where Thoukydides left off.)
By contrast, the most influential early figures in the development of the Roman historiographical tradition were Quintus Fabius Pictor (fl. c. 215 – c. 200 BCE) and Lucius Cincius Alimentus (fl. c. 200 BCE). Only a few fragments of their writings have survived to the present day.
In fact, most of the histories of Rome written in Latin that are known to have existed in ancient times have been entirely or almost entirely lost. Meanwhile, many works about Roman history written in Greek have survived to the present day in at least substantial portions, including Polybios of Megalopolis’s Histories, Dionysios of Halikarnassos’s Roman Antiquities, Kassios Dion’s Roman History, Herodianos of Antioch’s History of the Empire from the Death of Marcus, and Zosimos of Constantinople’s New History.
These works have survived to extent that they have primarily because the Byzantine Romans were interested in reading about Roman history in Greek and therefore copied them. Thus, for significant portions of Roman history, we are ironically primarily reliant on histories written in Greek, rather than histories written in Latin.
ABOVE: Detail from Wikimedia Commons of a scene from the Stele of Kleitor dating to the second century BCE, depicting the historian Polybios of Megalopolis, whose Histories, written in Greek, is the main surviving source for most of the Middle Roman Republic
Papyri
The third major reason why there are more surviving ancient writings in Greek than Latin is because papyrus fragments account for a very large share of the ancient texts that have survived to the present day. There are at least half a million surviving papyrus fragments from the Hellenistic and Roman periods. These fragments include some literary texts, but consist primarily of other texts, including administrative documents, wills, letters, records of land ownership, marriage records, and even grocery lists. Only an extremely tiny fraction of these papyri have been pieced together, transcribed, and published.
As I discuss in this article I wrote in July 2019 about the Library of Alexandria and the survival of ancient texts, the climates of Greece and Italy are generally too temperate and wet for papyri to survive in those places, even in fragments. As a result, nearly all the surviving ancient papyri come from the extremely dry climate of Egypt.
Egypt is located in the eastern Mediterranean. As such, it was continuously a part of the predominantly Greek-speaking cultural sphere from the late fourth century BCE until the conquests of the early Islamic caliphates in the seventh century CE. Even the Romans in Egypt mostly wrote their administrative documents in Greek. As a result of this, although there are some surviving papyri written in Latin, there are vastly more surviving papyri written in Greek.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 3035, a papyrus fragment from the city of Oxyrhynchos in Egypt bearing an arrest warrant in Greek for a Christian man named Petosarapin dated by its final line to the exact day 28 February 256 CE
Conclusion
I should clarify that, for the purposes of this article, I am only talking about things written in ancient times, which we can say, by a very broad definition, might include everything written before roughly the seventh century CE. As I am sure many commenters will point out, people continued writing in both Greek and Latin long after the end of antiquity. On account of this, if you open up the parameters of the question to include everything written in Greek or Latin at any point in history, then it becomes much harder to tell which language has a larger surviving corpus.
Sadly, I am not in a position to assess whether there are more surviving ancient texts written in Greek versus other well-attested ancient languages, such as Egyptian, Akkadian, Sanskrit, Classical Chinese, and so forth, because I do not have a good impression of how many surviving texts there are in those other languages.
Not to mention that since the Romans were heavily hellenized there was not much reason for them displace the Greek language has they adopted it and other customs. Hence the saying by the poet Horace (if I’m correct), “Captive Greece held captive her uncouth conqueror and brought the arts to the rustic Latin lands”.
Hi Spencer,
“coverage of the Christian church fathers is very incomplete, since the series arbitrarily includes some of the major church fathers, but not others”
The difference in the number of latin christian authors in Loeb over that of greek, is a preference of Loeb’s or because there are less greek christian texts available ?
If it is the second case, could that be because western/latin christian copiers did not copy as many manuscripts of the greek christian texts due to the “problems” between the two major christian centres (Rome vs New Rome/Constantinople) that eventually led to the Schism (1054), i.e. the western copiers did not want to preserve the texts of the “heretics” as they were seen at the time ?
Thanks for any light you can shed on the issue.
The reason why the Loeb Classical Library tends to include more writings of the western, Latin-language church fathers is because of the choice of whoever decides which texts to include in the series. It is not because there are more writings of the western, Latin-language church fathers that have survived than the eastern, Greek-language church fathers. On the contrary, there are arguably more surviving works of the Greek-language church fathers than the Latin-language ones, which is, again, partly a result of the fact that the Byzantine Romans copied the Greek-language church fathers for the most part very fastidiously.
Western European Latin Christians did not have access to most of the ancient writings in the Greek language for most the Middle Ages. Some writings were available in Latin translations and a few were available in the original Greek. For the most part, though, the Byzantine Romans were ones who had access to these texts who were studying them and copying them.
There are exceptions to this, of course. Notably, Origenes of Alexandria was widely condemned as a heretic in the east and the Byzantine Romans therefore tended to be less likely to copy his works. Ironically, western Latin-speaking Christians were, at least in some cases, more likely to study and copy his works. Origenes’s treatise On First Principles and some of his commentaries have been mostly lost in the original Greek and have primarily only survived through Latin translations by Tyrannius Rufinus.
As a linguist, thank you for saying ‘Classical Chinese’ instead of Chinese. Classical Chinese ended up diverging from the spoken varieties of Chinese pretty early on, not unlike Latin and Attic Greek, and yet a lot of people consider today’s Chinese as the same language as what was spoken millennia ago… while considering Latin a separate language from Italian/Sardinian/Romanian…
I can’t assess how large is the surviving corpus of Classical Chinese literature, but I know that very little (proportionally speaking) has been preserved from the pre-imperial period (also called the ancient/classical period), since the first emperor tried his best to eliminate texts that didn’t legitimize his sovereignity. The story has been exaggerated by later historians who had reasons to demonize the first emperor, but the gist of it is true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_books_and_burying_of_scholars
Also, while we have many fragmentary inscriptions written in Old Chinese, no works from earlier than the 6th century BCE have survived, aside from the Classic of Poetry. So Greek beats Classical Chinese in this regard, too.
All in all, I think that, in a similar time frame, the Classical Chinese corpus might be smaller than even Latin’s.
I heard of some the works, the most popular in the West seems to be the Art of War, the I Ching and the Tao Te Ching. The Art of War is can see since it was a war manual it’s probably straight forward in what it says, but I’ve tried reading the Tao Te Ching and it’s pretty cryptic. Maybe it’s because I’m not the intended audience for this mystical type of text. The I Ching is just a divination text from what I gather, and while the original method was sticks people today use coins instead.
Akkadian is our most well attested ancient language, much more so than Greek or anything else. This is because it was in use for c. 2500 years and because clay tablets preserve much better than papyrus or parchment.
I already suspected that there were probably more surviving ancient texts in both Akkadian and Egyptian than in Greek or Latin, but I didn’t want to say that as fact because I wasn’t sure.
You might guess so, but some studies by Carsten Peust and Michael P. Streck which I summarized in Ancient History Magazine 7 estimated 57 million published words of Greek, 10 million published words of Latin, and 10 million published words of Akkadian up to the year 300 CE https://www.karwansaraypublishers.com/ahm-issue-7.html The manuscript tradition still beats archaeological preservation, even in favourable conditions like cuneiform in Iraq!
Thank you, Sean, for pointing out this study. There is, however, a bit of a problem with it, if you want to use it to gauge how much has survived in each language. The problem is that there is a big difference between a text that has merely “survived” and a text that has been “published.”
I’m not an expert on cuneiform, but my understanding is that only an extremely tiny fraction of the surviving texts in cuneiform have actually been transcribed and published and there are vast archives containing hundreds of thousands of Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform tablets that no one has ever transcribed, published, or translated. As I understand it, the rate of publication for texts written in these languages is extremely slow, because there are maybe only a couple hundred people on earth at best who can even read Sumerian or Akkadian and most of them understandably do not enjoy the menial labor of transcribing and translating tablets that are not apparently relevant to their current research projects.
How can you know that there is a problem without reading the original studies or their English summaries to see how they define things? (If your library has the Reallexikon der Assyriologie, it has another summary in English under “Sprache”). My memory (and memory can be misleading which is why its good to read the originals) is that Streck included Near Eastern texts which have only been catalogued, but relied on corpora like the TLG and the CIL for Greek and Latin.
Fair enough. I haven’t read the study you reference, nor do I have time at this exact moment to track it down and read it, so I assumed (perhaps incorrectly) that it only counted texts that have been published, since that is how you described it here. I apologize if this was an incorrect assumption.
It seems like no ancient Akkadian or Egyptian text is as well know as the works of Homer, (whether he actually existed or not) the Greek playwrights, Plato and Aristotle, Caesar, Marcus Aurelius etc. I suspect it is largely due to the bias in favor of European or “western” culture.
Maybe because the Europeans, or those with western culture, were mindful of preserving their past, even in times when the christian present was not so eager to preserve the intellectual achievement of the pagan past…
It seems that the descendants of the Accadians/Sumerians/Egyptians were not interested enough in their own cultural past to preserve and study it… The Persians/Iranians maybe an exception partially.
Maybe the religious discontinuity that hit them in the 7th c.CE was not as tolerant as christianity?
In the context of the concept above, may I add that ancient greek and latin texts have survived more as copies of copies on perishable material and much less as inscriptions, whereas accadian, egyptian, etc have only survived as inscriptions on, more or less, hard material.
There is a huge world of difference between on one hand repeatedly and conscienciously and carefully copying from perishable papyrus/parchment/etc to another perishable over and over through the centuries and, on the other hand, writing something once only on a stone/clay tablet that gets buried to be found many centuries later…
At least for Ancient Egyptian, it is worth remembering that Egypt was prior to the Islamic conquest part of Christendom (and a minority of Coptic Christians still exist today). The Coptic language (which survived as a living language among this group until the 19th century) was a version of the ancient Egyptian language. However, due to the Greek influence in the country after Alexander, Coptic was written in a modified Greek alphabet, which meant that earlier written works in hieroglyphic, hieratic or demotic scripts were no longer readable.
Hi Spencer. I always enjoy reading your articles because they are cogently argued and presented in plain language. As a student (albeit a very old one) of early languages, I was fascinated to see your “very archaic Latin” quotation, “MANIOS MED FHEFHAKED NVMASIOI.” – which looks to my untutored eye like Faliscan,. I was even more pleased that I could glean its meaning. Outwith a university course in Classics, can you please suggest how I might learn more about very early Latin? Thank you for all you do to promote an understanding of the ancient world.
My favorite book on the subject-
https://www.amazon.com/Testaments-Time-Search-Manuscripts-Records/dp/0140211446/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=testaments+of+time&qid=1632666650&sr=8-1
Great article Spencer
Thank you so much! That’s very kind of you!
I have a question – when we say that an ancient text “survived”, what does it mean exactly? I am guessing that for some, we are very lucky to have an inscription on a material that could last until the present day, like a pottery, or maybe a papyrus or velum. But those are probably rare fragments. For the rest, aren’t we getting only copies of copies of copies? I don’t think we have neat volumes of e.g. Plato or Aristotle from the time they were alive, do we?
Well of course we only have copies of copies of copies. I don’t think there is a single ancient literary text for which we have the actual, autograph manuscript handwritten by the original author themself. If you’re expecting original autograph manuscripts of texts that were originally written two thousand years ago or more, that’s an unrealistic expectation.
Most people would agree that, if copies of the text of a work of ancient literature have survived, then the work has survived, even if we don’t have the original autograph manuscripts. It’s sort of like how, if you read a modern printed edition of Pride and Prejudice, you would still say you’re reading Jane Austen’s work, even if you aren’t reading her handwritten manuscript.
I wrote about how we know that the manuscripts that survive do go back to autograph originals in this article I wrote in April 2020.
There are plenty of literary inscriptions, especially epigrams, that were inscribed on stone slabs and survive until today. These arguably count as “original texts that survived”.
In some rare cases we even have the original inscription, and the same text attested by some ancient writer (whose work came down to us through copies of copies of copies).
Well, I was expecting copies of copies of copies – and my worry about that, is that we are not sure what we are getting. Intermediaries probably made mistakes, or modified the text along the way, according to their preferences, beliefs or other. For example, maybe Christian intermediaries found a way to re-interpret the writings of the Greeks and Romans to make them more compatible with their religion?
That’s what we have textual criticism for. Philologists, historians and others try to spot interpolations and errors using various methods.
In general though copyists were extremely scrupulous to copy the text as it was. The cases where later scribes willfully altered a Greek or Roman text to make it more compatible with their ideology are extremely rare. At the most they’d write a comment in the margins or a treatise refuting them.
I guess I just found another element of answer in another excellent post from Spencer: “Byzantine scholars were also deeply interested in Platonic philosophy, which is the main reason why all the dialogues of Plato, a number of pseudepigraphical writings attributed to Plato, many of the writings of Aristotle (who was Plato’s student), and the writings of many later Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophers have been all preserved in the original Ancient Greek. These are writings that Byzantine scholars studied and often interpreted through a Christian lens.” – I have an “authoritative” collection of Plato’s works in translation, which keeps mentioning “God” in several dialogues, and that was always struck me as suspicious – that’s what started my line of questioning here.
Βyzantine scribes didn’t alter ancient texts to suit their ideas. The Christian interpretation mentioned above was limited to commentaries, treatises and teaching material. Their intellectual integrity didn’t allow them to alter any texts, but when they disagreed with an ancient writer, they did write commentaries dismissing, refuting or elaborating on his writings.
As Georgi Parpulov notes in his article “Scribes and scholars in Byzantium”, which is online on the site of the British Library, the 10th c. archbishop of Caesarea, Arethas, owned a copy of Lucian, and «the archbishop felt no need to delete passages that he found objectionable, and most of his glosses are purely explanatory: it is clear that the ancient text was valued for its literary merits. This enlightened attitude – and the continuing study of classical Greek in Byzantium – allowed for the preservation of a good deal of pre-Christian Greek literature, which has reached us exclusively through handwritten copies made in the 9th or subsequent centuries.»
In the case of Plato, Homer and other popular writers of antiquity, we know that Byzantine copyists usually did a good job because we have other, earlier textual sources, e.g. fragments of their texts in Hellenistic and Roman papyri from Oxyrhynchus, which we can compare with Byzantine-era manuscripts.
Regarding Plato’s use of the singular “God”, there’s a whole post by Spencer on the subject (https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/12/20/was-socrates-a-monotheist/). Enjoy!
Thanks for all those fascinating details! Before I found this blog, I had a hard time getting that level of information. Thanks again!
But it sounds from that other post that Christian translators in the West (not Byzantium) tended to see Plato and Socrates as proto-Christians, and had no qualms about translating “theos” as “God”?
It’s not scientific, but in the early 1900’s Diels estimated that “the bulk of Greek literature is at least 10 times that of Latin” (this is quoted in the preface of LSJ) and that an exhaustive Greek dictionary might have as many as 120 volumes. (It’s only a rough estimation but gives an idea of the order of magnitude.)
Such a dictionary obviously doesn’t exist, and maybe never will. The Latin counterpart, Thesaurus linguae Latinae, extends until the 600’s (not exhaustive for the last centuries). It’s been published since the year 1900, and is still many decades shy from being completed (at the moment they are in the letter R, with Q missing and N being unfinished).
I strongly suspect that Sanskrit literature is vaster than Greek literature—the number of extant Sanskrit texts, many of them very long, is just so big. I’m not sure about Akkadian, but more than 1000,000 Akkadian clay tablets have so far been found. (Baked clay is quite indestructible when compared with papyrus or parchment.)
Thank you for this wonderfully informative article. I’m also intrigued by the comment that there may be more Akkadian or Egyptian texts. I still remember my first encounter with a translation of The Iliad at age 7. It set me up for a lifetime of love for Classical Greek literature, history, and philosophy. That such a world may exist in another ancient language and be recovered is heavenly news to all who love reading.
I’ve bookmarked your site, and I’m adding your RSS feeds to my Google account.