Philodemus and Greek Papyri (Classic Reprint) - Couverture souple

Paul G. Naiditch

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1330648080 ISBN 13 : 9781330648087

Editeur : Forgotten Books, 2017

Synopsis

Excerpt from Philodemus and Greek Papyri

Coming to the island of Chios in the year 1749, the Irish traveller Lord Charlemont observed that its Monastery possessed "a sort of library with many manuscripts lying in dust and rubbish. We spent an hour looking them over, hoping to have discovered some ancient treasure, but found nothing but some manuscripts of the Greek Fathers". Charlemont's desire to locate notable classical works was hardly limited to him: it belonged to an old tradition.

Efforts to recover manuscripts of classical writings reach back to antiquity itself. These were, inevitably, both occasional in nature as well as rigorous and deliberate. Only a few attempts, however, were systematic. Perhaps most notable were the efforts made at the Library of Alexandria. Over twenty-two hundred years ago, its collections contained hundreds of thousands of papyrus rolls. These survived at least for two centuries and not impossibly for half a millennium or more. Eventually, however, they were lost. The rolls themselves, whether burnt by Caesar's fire or destroyed by disintegration, infestation, accident, censorship, or indifference, disappeared. Additional copies, if they were produced, were insufficient to preserve the collections; and, with the decline of interest in classical literature, there was in addition less incentive either to copy texts anew or to preserve texts already in existence. During the second century of the common era, the works of scores of authors had been available: by the fifth century, it appears that only a handful of authors were regularly read or consulted; and much of classical literature was lost.

In the fourteenth century and the fifteenth another notable attempt to recover the classics was inaugurated. Inspired by Petrarch and his circle, enthusiasts undertook to retrieve and revivify the literature of classical antiquity. Petrarch himself has been described as "the first man since antiquity to make a systematic…

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Forgotten Books
• Date d'édition: 2017
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1330648080
• ISBN 13: 9781330648087
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 37
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