It's always been there and is pretty heavily subsidized - it's good enough stuff that the actual intelligentsia ( as opposed to .. tourists like myself ) consid

It's always been there and is pretty heavily subsidized - it's good enough stuff that the actual intelligentsia ( as opposed to .. tourists like myself ) considers it a critical resource. It doesn't cost that much to preserve, either. What do you think the old guys at, say, Cambridge study? You see the odd Classics scholar on BookTv now and again, and it's ( for me ) riveting stuff. It's just that mass culture has blown up so big so fast - driven by technological change - that it seems to get smaller. It doesn't help that the Stoics were explicitly targeted by the Christians early in the Christianized Byzantine Roman Empire. You can see this in action in YouTube videos of Christopher Hitchens debating various Christian thinkers.