This story at LiveScience about finding a 6th century manuscript in the binding of a 16th century book is interesting on its own:
In the mid-16th century, a bookbinder picked up a piece of parchment — one that was already centuries old — and used it to bind a book of poetry. This parchment’s text remained unreadable for nearly 500 years, but now, thanks to state-of-the-art imaging techniques, people can read its words once more, according to a new study.
An analysis of the sixth-century text revealed that it was part of the Roman law code. Whoever made the poetry book likely considered the text to be outdated, as at that point, society was using the church’s code, rather than Roman laws, the researchers said.
but it also highlights a point I’ve made here from time to time. The claim that all ancient manuscripts were just copied willy-nilly is just plain wrong. What was preserved by copying and what was allowed to crumble into dust was subject to editorial judgment.
That’s why we don’t really know what happened two millennia ago. Everything from the classical era that we have has been dragged through the judgment of medieval monks. If they thought it was worth saving, they copied it. If they didn’t, they didn’t. The Aeneid, Plato’s Republic, and Aristotle’s Ethics were all preserved because they were believed to prefigure Christianity or supported ideas that supported Christian ideas.
That’s why any notion that our ideas of individual liberty derive from ancient Greece and Rome is just plain wrong. To whatever extent those ideas derive from ancient Greece and Rome, they derive from whatever part of ancient Greece and Rome that medieval monks thought was worth preserving and, consequently, at the very least were compatible with Christian ideas.
In the English-speaking, French-speaking, and German-speaking world, the ancient past is viewed almost entirely through the lens of Christianity.
More specifically, the lens of Roman Catholicism, since Protestantism didn’t exist for another 500 years. More generally, Western Europe is the creation of Roman Catholicism, which is why it is so reviled today.
That’s right. To throw more cold water on the anti-papist pretensions of a lot of Americans in particular, the Enlightenment didn’t rise from the Calvinists. It rose from Italian Humanism.
There was a fair amount of preserved Classical material that came to Western Europe through Muslim and Orthodox traditions around the 15th Century, via the reconquest of Spain and the influx of Byzantine refugees to Italy following the fall of Constantinople, respectively. But those traditions had their own filters.
Tangentially, there’s a significant thread of scholarship that’s worked on reconstructing the original form of Classical sources that have come down to us separately through Christian and Muslim copies, both of which clearly have been embellished, by comparing the two and deducing the content of the pre-embellishment source text. I came across this a while back while looking at analysis of the passage in Josephus’s writings that’s been cited as evidence for the historicity of Jesus.
The Orthodox are Christians and the Muslim sources were rarely working from originals but from Christian copies of assumed ancient originals.
To the best of my knowledge none of the presumably ancient works Greek and Roman texts the Founding Fathers read (mostly in translation) relied on Muslim sources.
Much more of whatever classical tradition has come down to us was preserved in Old Irish than was preserved in Arabic but that’s a subject for another post.
Josephus is interesting. Basically, he’s an awful historical source. He relies too heavily on scripture. In other words he’s barely a secondary source let alone a primary one. His best use was his original purpose: communicating Jewish tradition to a mostly Greek-speaking intelligentsia. In the manuscript tradition my recollection is that all surviving versions were derived from four “transmission blocks”, none complete. I believe that the oldest extant Josephus manuscript dates from the 13th century, more than a millennium after the assumed original. To believe in inerrant transmission over such a period requires a leap of faith.