Ancient History is Still Almost Completely Unknown to Us

Something is always lost in translation. Always means: even with the very best translation, and greater loss the less good the translation is. I can assert this, but how can I demonstrate it to anyone who is monolingual? And of course everyone else can see it for themselves and doesn't need any explanation from me.

And so, it seems to me, you can only get so far in studying ancient history without learning at least a little bit of ancient languages. And when you study these languages, there's the point at which you realize how little of them from the ancient world is still known to us. We're piecing together a huge jigsaw puzzle with just a handful of pieces. And the pieces are badly damaged.

And this is why we get so excited over every single puny scrap of re-discovered ancient writing, and why students of ancient Greek have been so excited since the late 19th century.

To mention just a single example of the sparsity of the ancient writing which we now know: on the Bryn Mawr Classical Review in 2006, Eric Hamer asserts that "almost seventy-five percent of the extant Latin literature of the period 90-40 BC is written by" Cicero. Peter Knox and J.C. McKeown, in a piece published on the Oxford University Press in 2013, say something similar, namely that "seventy-five percent of what survives in Latin from Cicero’s lifetime was written by Cicero himself [...] There are no extant speeches, forensic or otherwise, by anyone but Cicero till AD 100."

By my count, the Loeb Classical Library currently offers 31 volumes of Cicero, and by my very rough estimate, they average about 500 pages of main text, for a total of a little over 15,000 pages. Divide in half because half of those pages are English translation, and we're left with 7500 pages of Cicero. Which means, if the estimates of Hamer, Knox and McKeown are good ones (and I think they are), that we're left with about 2500 pages of Latin literature, besides Cicero, from the time of the reigns of Sulla, Pompey and Caesar. Not 2500 pages of historical writing, but 2500 surviving pages -- small, Loeb-sized pages -- of writing of every type. Caesar, Lucretius, Catullus, almost all of Sallust, and every one of their Latin-writing contemporaries but Cicero, from one of the most interesting, most intensively-studied eras in Roman history.

This makes it much less surprising that historians and philologists studying this era rely so much on later writers like Suetonius, and non-Latin writers such as Plutarch. What choice do they have? They must take what they can find, wherever they can find it. Studying Roman history or Latin literature, one can only go so far with just Latin, before beginning to keenly feel the lack of Greek.

For that matter, one can only go so far in studying ancient Greek history or literature without a grasp of Arabic. And for that matter, Coptic and Armenian and Syriac and Hebrew and ancient Persian each can fill in significant missing pieces of the puzzle.

And how much more light would be shown upon the ancient Mediterranean if more writing in Phoenician had survived, or if we could read Etruscan. And I've left out many of your favorite languages: Sumerian! you're shouting, or Hittite! and quite rightly so, and still more languages. We have still so very far to go. We haven't yet scratched the surface of the history of the Classical ancient world. We've learned so much, and there's so very far yet to go.