Quote:
Originally Posted by sun surfer
That's interesting to think how some works have so barely survived. It's also a bit sad to think of the flip side, of the others that are lost.
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A figure that's often quoted is that we have around about 5% of the literature from the classical Greek and Roman periods.
Sometimes works have survived accidentally (eg as palimpsests); others have been deliberately preserved. An example of the latter is the Greek philosopher Plato. We possess the complete works of Plato simply because his philosophical ideas tie in very nicely with Christianity, and hence his work was preserved and copied by the early Christian church.