Excerpt from Philodemus and Greek Papyri
Coming to the island of Chios in the year 1749, the Irish traveller Lord Charlemont observed that its Monastery possessed "a sort of library with many manuscripts lying in dust and rubbish. We spent an hour looking them over, hoping to have discovered some ancient treasure, but found nothing but some manuscripts of the Greek Fathers". Charlemont's desire to locate notable classical works was hardly limited to him: it belonged to an old tradition.
Efforts to recover manuscripts of classical writings reach back to antiquity itself. These were, inevitably, both occasional in nature as well as rigorous and deliberate. Only a few attempts, however, were systematic. Perhaps most notable were the efforts made at the Library of Alexandria. Over twenty-two hundred years ago, its collections contained hundreds of thousands of papyrus rolls. These survived at least for two centuries and not impossibly for half a millennium or more. Eventually, however, they were lost. The rolls themselves, whether burnt by Caesar's fire or destroyed by disintegration, infestation, accident, censorship, or indifference, disappeared. Additional copies, if they were produced, were insufficient to preserve the collections; and, with the decline of interest in classical literature, there was in addition less incentive either to copy texts anew or to preserve texts already in existence. During the second century of the common era, the works of scores of authors had been available: by the fifth century, it appears that only a handful of authors were regularly read or consulted; and much of classical literature was lost.
In the fourteenth century and the fifteenth another notable attempt to recover the classics was inaugurated. Inspired by Petrarch and his circle, enthusiasts undertook to retrieve and revivify the literature of classical antiquity. Petrarch himself has been described as "the first man since antiquity to make a systematic collection of Latin classical manuscripts". His friends and successors continued his work, and the invention of printing established on a firm basis, and made generally available, the texts thus laboriously or fortuitously recovered. Indeed, most of the ancient compositions included in classical series today were first printed in the fifteenth or sixteenth century: Latin classics notably by the printers Sweynheym and Pannartz, Johann de Spira, and Nicolaus Jenson, the Greek classics chiefly by Aldus Manutius and his heirs, Froben and the Stephani.
The discovery of classical writings did not cease with the 1500's. Yet, after mid-centuty, those new works that came to light were of less interest to the majority of scholars and men of letters than those that earlier had been found. Where previous years had seen the first published editions of major works, writings by Cicero, Vergil, and Livy, Homer, Aristotle, Thucydides, Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Pindar, the latter had to be content with Appian. Aretaeus, Aristaenetus and Antoninus Liberalis: authors not without significance, but also unlikely to excite general interest or enthusiasm.
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