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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

It’s also possible that much of what was lost was frankly not worth preserving, perhaps time has acted as a great filter.

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Or also vice-versa, and what we have is a sample of the quantity peak, rather than quality.

Perhaps Gilgamesh is the equivalent of I Dream of Jeannie.

:-)

Gilgamesh definitely reads like a comic book. I would be surprised if it weren’t popular entertainment.

Aeschylus did great work, winning prize after prize in playwriting competitions. Only seven of his 90 or so plays survive. It'd be great to read the rest of this work and there's no particular reason to believe it's of low quality.

Yeah, I was about to make the exact same comment albeit mentioning Sophocles and his roughly 120 plays.

If you’re into classical literature, what was lost can be extremely tantalizing. I read Cicero’s De Re Publica recently, of which only about 35-ish% survived. What’s there is so interesting, both for what it says about the structure of the Roman republic as it existed, and what an educated traditional Roman of the senatorial class thought about how best to structure society and government. The concluding Dream of Scipio is enough to make you cry, not just for its extreme beauty and elegiac tone, but also for the fact that the dialogue it concludes only came down to us in a mutilated state.

While much of what was lost was surely dross, we also lost some of the great achievements of human culture too.

This quote from the great Carl Sagan, concerning the library of Alexandria but generally applicable: "We do know that of the 123 plays of Sophocles in the Library, only 7 survived. One of those seven is Oedipus Rex. Similar numbers apply to the works of Aeschylus and Euripides. It is a little as if the only surviving works of a man named William Shakespeare were Coriolanus and A Winter’s Tale, but we had heard that he had written certain other plays, unknown to us but apparently prized in his time – works entitled Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet."

> If you’re into classical literature, what was lost can be extremely tantalizing.

I would very much like to read Suetonius’ Lives of Famous Whores and would bet I’m not the only one.

Or Diogenes’ On Farting.

and Steinbacchus' Of Nice Women

I don’t disagree. Back then copying manuscripts was exceedingly expensive, so it’s not unreasonable to suppose that the other 83 were good, but insufficiently so for enough copies to be made to assure survival.

At least we have Bignose’s[1] pickup and breakup manuals.

[1] Publius Ovidius Naso

Strangely like the filter we are creating now. Digital storage may be more ephemeral than stone. I would not lose sleep if much of the content created so far this century were lost.

There’s a form of democracy of duplication - on average the more popular (which isn’t necessarily a substitute for quality to be sure) things will be more duplicated, and more chances to survive.

This is how I perceive it as well. I'm not necessarily advocating for christianity or islam here, but there's a reason they've been much more successful than other various pagan religions.

Yet, they are not as successful as the secret Platonic influence underlying Christianity, Islam and the secular Academy. There are many mysteries about the past still to be discovered in the future.

There is no secret platonic influence in catholicism. In the latin church, it's openly encouraged. I was just discussing platonic ideals after mass today with fellow parishioners and how important it is to pursue truth. The priest had even mentioned Plato in his homily on the nature of truth There's nothing secret here. Christianity is openly and unashamedly compatible with many aspects of Plato's philosophy. In fact, the catholic church has also ruled on the validity of other similarly secular philosophies of other civilizations (see the Chinese rites controversy or Merton's books on Taoism -- Christ the eternal Tao). In general, other than the protestants, Christianity does not require you to immediately reject the works of secular philosophers.

In fact, Islam and christianity are why we still study Plato today. There is no secret or conspiracy.

I really appreciate your exposition. Maybe "open secret" is more appropriate. It is certainly esoteric, but not a conspiracy as you say.

But let me put it this way. Most Christians would be surprised to discover that the original conception of god is Platonic — i.e., a god of cosmic unity, a god of ineffable oneness, as opposed to a singular god. After all, it is only in the esoteric Judaic tradition that the god of Moses is a principle and not a person.

Pope Theophilus supposedly massacred 10,000 monks who believed in the non-person version of God. Happy to share links on that history.

I'm not sure you can call the original conception of the abrahamic god as platonic. Platonism comes in when we start getting Jews who are awaiting the Logos, Jesus Christ. Certainly platonism helped pave the way for the success of Christianity.

Also I don't think there was a pope Theophilus. Perhaps you are referring to a non roman pontiff.

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