Hacker News Reader

Comment by iandanforth | Hacker News Reader

I was recently reading the Greek Myths series by Stephen Fry and he makes a point of how there are so many stories we know of but have been lost from ancient texts. Stories and authors that were famous enough to be mentioned by multiple other authors but which themselves have been lost. This collection of scrolls could contain some of those lost stories and the possibility of that is terribly exciting.

View on HN

>stories we know of but have been lost from ancient texts

So many there's a lengthy list on Wikipedia about it. It's fascinating reading ancients casually referencing works that we otherwise know nothing else about. Without the careful, laborious copying (often imperfect) over the centuries most things would've been lost completely. There's also other works such as maps that did not survive, the Tabula Peutingeriana for example is thought to be a derivative work of one commissioned by Augustus of the known world at the time (to Romans) and of which there's a few mentions in some works by historians at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_literary_work

Seutonius' Lives of Famous Whores is a lost text I've always hoped we would recover at some point.

A great example about lost work is that the insights we have onto Viking mythology was pretty much documented by a single guy, Snorri Sturluson. What we know about Norse mythology is just a tiny piece of their mythos, as they didn't have the habit of writing down their tales/legends/stories and most of it got lost after they converted to Christianism.

And those are just the known unknowns. Besides those, to borrow from Rumsfeld, there are the unknown unknowns.

Not just works of fiction or mythology but also histories, and works of science and philosophy.

I want Aristotle's treatise on Comedy, and if I'm allowed to be terribly greedy, just one more play by Aeschylus.

This is the most exciting thing in the world to me right now, these scrolls, along with the thought that there might be literally thousands more still in the ground.

Might want to put on a pair of gloves and a respirator if you find that Aristotle volume. Some people were pretty offended by it, I understand.

I would love to read the Telegony. Homer did such a good job with episodes I and II that I'm really curious how the story ends.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com