>tfw we will never have the full account of the Trojan War as relayed by the Epic Cycle
How do I live with this feeling?
>tfw we will never have the original works of the cynics
>thw I will never have access to the varamchara marga tantra
>>8272666
By stop being a pussy and being happy with the brilliant works we have.
>>8272672
he was probably cold, you todger shrivels up when it's cold
>>8273023
>mfw shrinkage
>>8272666
Most of the other books were not only not written by Homer, but were generally regarded to be of lower quality. So I'm not really that bummed about it.
>>8272666
We should take consolation in the fact that what we do have is probably the good stuff, anyway. The good stuff as judged by presumably knowledgeable, bookish people at the library of Alexandria at first, then at Constantinople. They were readers, critics and scholars, opinionated and elitist, people whose lives revolved around books as they had nothing else to invest their lives into, high-functioning autists with blimpy, spergish egos and nothing to do, in other words the ancient equivalent of this board.
...shit.
>>8273203
Now I'm even more depressed.
Find a copy somehow of The Epic Cycle: A Commentary on the Lost Troy Epics by M. L. West (Oxford UP). I haven't seen one for under $100 yet.
>>8272666
Yeah but it was very inferior to the Iliad/Odyssey.
I think if I could bring back one prose writer it would be Varro, just because he wrote about everything under the sun, and it would do more for our understanding of the Classical world than anything else could. The tiny bits that do survive (a few books of De Lingua Latina and a De Re Rustica) are fascinating enough. It's funny that he had a reputation for being a very dry author. His style is dry and unadorned but the content is really cool.
What's with all the Homer threads lately?
>>8272683
>the cynics
Yeah, I'd give up a ball for Menippus' satires. Damn and Petronius too, I wish we had the whole thing.
>>8273203
Yeah but most of that good stuff was lost. We have a lot of the best stuff (but by no means all), but then look at how many Greek tragedies have survived, look at how much of Greek lyric there is, look at how much Sappho. Catullus barely survived and in very rough shape, so much so that in some poems you are reading a critic's judgment of what Catullus would have said, not Catullus himself, because the archetype was so corrupt. In some cases, which critic you follow changes the meaning of the entire poem.
The problem with those knowledgable, bookish elites is that they found religion and spent less and less time on secular literature. There's this one passage in one of Gregory of Tours' works, or I think it was him, I can't find it now; but basically he describes himself as standing on the seaside, with a heap of secular literature next to him, and the tide is coming in to wash it away to sea, and he doesn't lift a finger to save it, but turns his thoughts toward Christ.
And of course it was much more complicated than that, you had men like Boethius who recognized the inherent value of secular literature and philosophy, and people like Augustine and Cassiodorus who thought pagan works should be studied because they helped to understand the Bible (take the first line of John, it's all Greek philosophy). Then you had people like Jerome, who pretended to spurn secular literature, but were so deeply imbued with it from their earlier education that they constantly quote and allude to it consciously and unconsciously anyway.
