Rome didn’t just lose its books to humidity. It lost the culture of copying and preserving them. Once the elite traded deep reading for gossip and scandal, nobody kept paying the scribes.
We’re repeating it, only faster. Our knowledge sits on servers we don’t own, in formats that die every decade, kept alive by ad money instead of duty.
Cassiodorus fought to save the past like it was spiritual warfare.
The loss of works following the sacks of Constantinople by crusaders in 1204, the Ottomans in 1453, and fires and earthquakes in that city was also a factor. The Bibliotheca of Photius compiled in the late ninth century references hundreds of works from antiquity, half of which were subsequently lost.
It's a distortion to say that knowledge was lost when Rome fell. It was lost to varying degrees in the barbarian occupied West, but the Greek East was always more literate and more populous, and if you were a citizen of Antioch or Alexandria your access to books changed not at all by the fall of Rome. Byzantine historians get very upset when people talk about 'lost' works that remained part of Eastern literary and intellectual life for most of the next 1,000 years.
This is more supposition than informed academic study, but I tend to think that some texts were gone earlier than others. We can partly tell by tracking the last time books are mentioned by other authors, but there are not an immense amount of such references. It would make sense for Greek drama and Livy to go away sooner than others, because paying to copy both works would be against current taste, politics, and religious preference.
Most importantly, Christianity destroyed more books than anything else. Not in a literal sense, but book budgets are more or less finite. Every Christian text that you pay to have copied is one less Latin and Greek book that you decline to copy, and which eventually decays into nothingness.
Thanks for replying. I think you're right on the Byzantine point. The piece is necessarily simplified for a general audience. The statement about opportunity cost and copying budgets is one I would like to look into more. Hadn't considered that. Thanks for the idea for a future essay.
Yes, there's all kind of fluctuations in the price, quality, and access to papyrus, the price and availability of educated slaves, the relative wealth necessary to keep slaves that don’t do manual labor, and the extent to which book owners are transitioning away from papyrus for both economic and aesthetic reasons.
Reductions in the amount of slaves that can read Greek or Latin and in the quality of papyrus are going to result in an average decline in the number of books preserved in a particular local economy, but I don’t think either the literary sources or archaeology are going to be able to tell us much about this. You could also work backward from someone like Isidorus, who was able to write his Etymologiae in 6th Century Spain, and see what is known about the local economy.
Great article and very detailed. I sometimes still wonder what kind of amazing works we lost and will never hear about again.
When I think that we lost almost all of Aristotle’s works……wow that’s sad.
Rome didn’t just lose its books to humidity. It lost the culture of copying and preserving them. Once the elite traded deep reading for gossip and scandal, nobody kept paying the scribes.
We’re repeating it, only faster. Our knowledge sits on servers we don’t own, in formats that die every decade, kept alive by ad money instead of duty.
Cassiodorus fought to save the past like it was spiritual warfare.
We treat it like someone else’s cloud bill.
The loss of works following the sacks of Constantinople by crusaders in 1204, the Ottomans in 1453, and fires and earthquakes in that city was also a factor. The Bibliotheca of Photius compiled in the late ninth century references hundreds of works from antiquity, half of which were subsequently lost.
I have not reasrched that in detail. Will do so!
doing a follow up essay on monday. The history here is too interesting to pass by.
True. What of what we write will stilll be here in 100 yrs?
It's a distortion to say that knowledge was lost when Rome fell. It was lost to varying degrees in the barbarian occupied West, but the Greek East was always more literate and more populous, and if you were a citizen of Antioch or Alexandria your access to books changed not at all by the fall of Rome. Byzantine historians get very upset when people talk about 'lost' works that remained part of Eastern literary and intellectual life for most of the next 1,000 years.
This is more supposition than informed academic study, but I tend to think that some texts were gone earlier than others. We can partly tell by tracking the last time books are mentioned by other authors, but there are not an immense amount of such references. It would make sense for Greek drama and Livy to go away sooner than others, because paying to copy both works would be against current taste, politics, and religious preference.
Most importantly, Christianity destroyed more books than anything else. Not in a literal sense, but book budgets are more or less finite. Every Christian text that you pay to have copied is one less Latin and Greek book that you decline to copy, and which eventually decays into nothingness.
Thanks for replying. I think you're right on the Byzantine point. The piece is necessarily simplified for a general audience. The statement about opportunity cost and copying budgets is one I would like to look into more. Hadn't considered that. Thanks for the idea for a future essay.
Yes, there's all kind of fluctuations in the price, quality, and access to papyrus, the price and availability of educated slaves, the relative wealth necessary to keep slaves that don’t do manual labor, and the extent to which book owners are transitioning away from papyrus for both economic and aesthetic reasons.
Reductions in the amount of slaves that can read Greek or Latin and in the quality of papyrus are going to result in an average decline in the number of books preserved in a particular local economy, but I don’t think either the literary sources or archaeology are going to be able to tell us much about this. You could also work backward from someone like Isidorus, who was able to write his Etymologiae in 6th Century Spain, and see what is known about the local economy.
Thanks for the shout out brother!
Yes sir