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Comment by seizethecheese | Hacker News Reader

Disagree. My understanding is that most surviving works have been transcribed repeatedly over the centuries, often times based on preferences of the people living at the time. There’s a big chance that excavation could find deeply heterodox stuff, I think.

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I think it's less that the stuff would be considered heterodox, as just not as good/relevant. Like certain texts were used in the Roman world for school, just kind of universally taught to the literate class. The Aeneid was one of these but before it was written the Annales by Ennius was the classic poem everyone had to learn. Then the Annales became less popular, stopped being taught, and now we only have some fragments of it.

> There’s a big chance that excavation could find deeply heterodox stuff, I think.

Heterodoxy (or really, orthodoxy) wasn't really a thing in 79ad, and you're not likely to find much of it in the private library of a wealthy Roman's vacation home. The only forbidden work you're going to see from that era is stuff critical of the emperor.

I mean heterodox as seen by medieval monks, so deeply unchristian things, for example.

It's hard to imagine something more heterodox than Ovid (he managed to get himself exiled by Augustus), and that survived. Medieval readers didn't seem to mind that sort of thing in Greco Roman writing, it was part of their heritage, no one was seriously worshipping those gods so it wasn't seen as a threat. The people in the past behaving in a way that was seen as immoral wasn't a problem.

The folks in the monastery were more open minded towards those who proceeded in the previous millennium than we are to those a thousand years ago.

That said, they had limited resources. This is very cool

Epicureanism was fairly heterodox/countercultural even during its heyday, and our sources on it are much more limited than the sources on more acceptable schools such as Stoicism. For example, we don't really have any writings from Epicurus except for short fragments, when we know from his students that he wrote many books. Much more survives from his students, but even then one of the main sources of our knowledge of Epicureanism (especially before we started recovering Herculaneum scrolls) was Seneca, a Stoic writing about it as a rival school. None of this was forbidden at the time, but it was unpopular (especially among the ruling class) and eccentric (ditto).

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