Monday, January 3, 2022

When the religion shifts, the libraries die

As for how to double-check this Master Historian: the Greeks already knew how to write histories, and a certain Ephorus had written one upon this same topic. Ephorus' history doesn't survive but someone must have epitomised it since it's referred by others. Comic playwrights also were active, like Cratinus and Aristophanes. These got copied - by later Greeks keen to send up parallel events in their own times, and then by Latins.

Such other-histories and comedies survived for Plutarch. Not often so far beyond him.

It may be that Aristophanes survived because some of his plays mention Socrates; where Cratinus dropped off because he did not mention Socrates.

This looks like what happened to the Carian and Lydian literature, if it wasn't lucky enough to get paraphrased into Greek. It looks much more like what happened to Demotic. The Egyptian language wouldn't die off until the late Middle Ages and is well understood (by scholars) to this day. The Christians simply chose not to copy such "lies of Pharaoh", as Ptolemy of Mendes translated Manetho for the Greeks.

No comments:

Post a Comment