The
survival of Greekwas precarious. It relied on fragile physical texts being copied and recopied
by generations of scribes. Often only the most popular or influential texts were recopied. A
book might cost the equivalent of several weeks`salary for a laborer, and so people owned few
books. Since all books were copied by hand, there weren`t massive numbers of copies of the same
book in bookstores. Instead, if you wanted a book, you would normally go to a book dealer who
had a copy of the text, and order a copy made for you, a process that would take several weeks,
and was quite expensive. This means that unless a book was used as a school text, important to a
philosophical, medical or other school or profession, or very important in some other way, it
wouldn`t get copied.
For , his plays were lost in several stages. First,
those plays which did not win prizes at festivals were unlikely to be copied.
Next, a major stage in preservation was the establishment of the canon of Attic
authors by the librarians and scholars of Alexandria. This included a selection of plays by 3
tragic playwrights (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides). Anything not in this canon (a sort of list
of important books`) was unlikely to be preserved. After the fall of the western Roman empire,
classical works were recopied in Byzantium and Christian monasteries -- but many were not
recopied.
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