The survival rate of ancient literature

[Sean Manning]

Hi Theodosius,

Sorry for the late reply, but I needed time to write a full answer.

Yes, Cicero was one of the secular authors lucky enough to have been accepted by the Church early on.

1. And many more on the same period :
   
2. Caesar's 'Commentaries'
   
3. Catullus
   
4. Livy
   
5. Vergil
   
6. Tacitus
   
7. Suetonius
   
8. Ovid
   
9. Horace

All of these deal with poetry (some of which being vulgar to Christians), pagan mythology and history. A classically educated Roman Christian would have been versed in many if not all these pagan authors. Christians also thought of themselves as Romans and to be cultured was to be classically educated. This remained true in the 4th century and far afterward. I think you may have a misconception that one's Christian identity automatically obscured one's Roman identity which just isn't accurate. Christians could be just as nationalistic as any pagan Roman.

But there was a period of about 400 years where hardly anyone in western Europe seems to have cared about preserving pagan literature, and that is when the greatest loss of Latin literature probably took place.

Could you please be more specific about which 400 years you're referring to ?

To be safe, say 500 to 800 CE (only 300 years, I know). The date at which books began to be lost on a large scale seems quite debatable, and you could make a case for as early as 400 CE. The Carolingian Renaissance seems to have stopped the large-scale loss of Latin books. Many new works were written in the 'dark ages', like Geoffrey of Tours' history and Isidore of Seville's encyclopaedia and the written versions of the Germanic law codes, but book copying seems to have been on too small a scale to preserve most ancient literature in the west. Similarly, only a few people were educated enough to appreciate most ancient literature: not many were reading Cicero or Virgil or Horace. The Carolingian Renaissance much reduced the rate of loss by reviving basic education and book production and bringing political order.

According to Warren Treadgold, Renaissances Before the Renaissance p. 11, “The measure of the disaster is that the great majority of the Latin literature that was ever lost disappeared between 550 and 750, when secular texts were left uncopied and were often even erased or discarded.â€