aristotle

Kiwi Hellenist
Who preserved Greek literature? (Part 2)
So in the story of the loss of ancient Greco-Roman literature, library fires are just a footnote. No single library had a monopoly on the classics anyway. A much bigger role was played by a format shift that affected every book, everywhere: the shift from scroll to codex. That format shift took place in the years 100 to 400 — in antiquity: most of the loss occurred before the dissolution of the western empire.
Interesting history of preserved Greek texts. Expiring formats have always been a problem, I guess? When Word, Powerpoint, and PDFs eventually die we're going to lose a lot of knowledge. It's easier to copy data once it's digital, but it's also easier to erase.
Recommended · Apr 7th, 1:03 pm

Fragility

I find it amazing that two people acting against contemporary sentiment saved some of the works of Aristotle from complete oblivion. Boethius aggressively translated Greek philosophy into Latin in the Middle Ages and Cassiodorus preserved it:
"Cassiodorus retires from public office at the age of fifty and moves to Vivarium, a town in southern Italy. It is an epochal move, since to house his library he founds an abbey that begins the monastic tradition of preserving and copying ancient manuscripts. Boethius rests in an unmarked grave, but his translations and commentaries on Aristotle's works, his textbooks, and his prison memoirs live on. For the next five centuries, they are copied and recopied by monks who hardly know what they are preserving, or why." — Richard E. Rubenstein, Aristotle's Children.
Is founding a monastic order for the sole purpose of preserving knowledge that no one in your own time cares about brilliant or mad?
Sep 21st, 2009, 10:38 pm
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