I have a confession to make: I don’t love everything about the Classics. That’s right, there’s something that I hate about the Classics, something that I can’t stand to hear every time it’s brought up. What is it? It’s that we don’t know everything, and I can’t stand that.
There is nothing that annoys me more than learning that we only have fragments of a text, or that a text has been lost to time, or that we don’t know about a topic because our sources don’t discuss it, and archeology can only do so much to uncover the answers. I hate it, but that’s the price you pay for studying the ancient past.
Then there’s the problem with the sources that we do have. There are clearly biases, and there are times when we debate whether our sources are credible. A Roman emperor well-liked by the Senate will be painted in a more favorable light in a book written by a senator than an emperor who wasn’t liked by the Senate and might even be slandered. Herodotus is said to be the father of history, yet there is a debate on how much of his information we can trust and which parts reflect historical events and which are just tales that he is passing on as fact.
However, biases and debating credibility are issues that any historian must consider, and we must deal with them today. There are certainly biases in modern writing, and there are questions of credibility, particularly when artificial intelligence is brought into the mix. AI didn’t exist in the ancient world, but that doesn’t mean that everything written doesn't accurately reflect the events that happened.
Propaganda is an ancient craft practiced by the Romans and the Greeks, and other ancient societies. Just because Greeks and the Romans didn’t have television and the Internet doesn’t mean that they weren’t subjected to messages that their rulers wanted them to see in a way that might not have been entirely truthful.
I don’t mind this so much because, as I said before, we have to deal with biases and credibility in the modern world. We are all taught in school what a credible source is (and ironically, we ignore the possibility of propaganda and consider government websites credible). But I find it frustrating to learn that a source doesn’t exist or only partially survives in quotes in another source.
Some things have been lost to the past, such as the rest of the epic cycle the Iliad and the Odyssey belonged to. But for others, we have fragments because other authors quote the text. Take, for example, the Arian Heresy, a major controversy in the early church, which divided Christianity long before the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox divide. It was such a significant split that Constantine convened a council to try to mend the rift. You would think we would have the Thalia from Arius, the bishop for whom the heresy is named, but we don’t have the full text. What we have is Arius being quoted by someone else.
And that someone else is Arius’ enemies, people who almost certainly misquote him or cherry-pick the weakest of his arguments to refute. So, what we do have of Arius’ work, at least his Thalia, we might not be able to trust.
Today, politicians are misquoted all the time by their opponents, but we have the means to go online, find the whole speech or statement that the politician said, and determine for ourselves whether or not the fifteen-second clip on the news or the minute viral TikTok video is an accurate reflection of what the politician said. Similarly, if we see someone quoting a controversial text, we can buy the book or get it out of the library, read it, and determine if the author is being quoted accurately or not.
These are luxuries we have, albeit luxuries that aren’t utilized much, when we are discussing contemporary figures and what they said or wrote. We don’t have that for the Classical World, and I hate it. I can’t read a controversial figure such as Arius without his enemies presenting to me what he said. However, I am okay with sitting down and thinking about whether our sources that say Caligula made his horse a consul can be trusted, or if they were turning an offhanded joke that the emperor made into something serious to depict him as a deranged tyrant.
Biases, possible slander, and propaganda form a fun puzzle to solve. They teach you not just to trust what the text says, but to take a closer look at context and critically think about what you are reading. I don’t mind doing that, but what bothers me is that we have extensive written histories of Alexander the Great and the wars of his successors. Yet, we lack much of the Hellenistic period that followed, seemingly because it was deemed unimportant or uninteresting. Because of this, we don’t know a lot about, say, the Seleucid Empire, than we do about Alexander’s. Alexander and the Wars of the Diadochi are interesting. When those wars ended, the successor kingdoms didn’t really matter unless they fought a war against the Romans, except for Ptolemaic Egypt.
I dislike the fact that the ancients didn’t prioritize the preservation of general knowledge. They said, “Ah, yes, Caesar and Augustus, we need them. Who cares about the Seleucid Empire?” It’s not just history, though. We have Plato and Aristotle because the early Christian church wanted to preserve them, as the two were deemed compatible with Christian morals. We don’t have too many examples of other ancient philosophers as a result.
Now, sometimes we don’t have a text because of someone saying, “No, we don’t need that,” or “We’re Christian, now get rid of it.” I am affected by their choices, since I can only write about the things that survived and were preserved. You, my readers, are affected by their choices because I am affected by their choices.
I can deal with not having a text because there were only a few copies of the text and they were destroyed in a fire or disintegrated over time. That’s understandable, but what I find frustrating is knowing that a text was lost simply because it wasn’t deemed interesting enough, or perhaps a political figure disliked it, or the Church said, “Thanks, but no thanks.” The Iliad and the Odyssey were part of a larger epic cycle, but we lack the other epics that comprised it. I don’t even want to look up whether that’s because the other epics were lost to time or because someone, somewhere, at some time thought only the Iliad and the Odyssey were worthy of preservation, because it will annoy me.
Unless copies of those other epics are found at an archeology site, we will never get them back. Never. It’s not possible unless someone invents a time machine, and that’s not likely. And of course, they are plays that we will never have either. Sure, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus should be preserved because they made great tragic plays (though we still don’t have all of their work and they each wrote dozens of plays). But the plays were a part of a competition that went on in Athens for generations, so we know that there must have been more playwrights, but we don’t have their plays. If we did, would we think that Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus were as good as we thought?
But in the ancients' defense, preservation was a problematic, labor-intensive task for them. They didn’t have the technology that we have today. They couldn’t scan a text and transform it into a PDF, and they lacked specialized rooms that would maintain a specific temperature to prevent the degradation of ancient books. They didn’t have a keyboard to type on; they had to write everything by hand painstakingly. So, I understand that preservation of texts was a herculean feat for them, one that would take a significant amount of time, time that could be better spent farming or doing something else that was crucial.
Despite this, I consider it a tragedy that a text isn’t in existence, and I get annoyed when I learn that people decided not to preserve it for one reason or another. A library catching fire and some rare texts being lost, I can forgive; choosing not to pass down knowledge, philosophical works, and literature, I have a hard time forgiving, no matter what people’s motivations were. They were actively choosing to let knowledge die out, preventing it from being passed on to future generations.
Anyways, that’s the end of my rant. If you liked what you read and want more, please consider subscribing; it’s free! Also, please share this post and publication with anyone who may like it. And since it’s topical for this post, feel free to comment if you'd like me to write about the Great Library of Alexandria. Thanks for reading!