It’s surprising to me that the author finds it improbable that we don’t know many ancient writers. It’s always been my default assumption that the vast majority

It’s surprising to me that the author finds it improbable that we don’t know many ancient writers. It’s always been my default assumption that the vast majority of all works and writers of antiquity were lost. I would expect that, like today, there is a relatively small number of hugely popular works, which had a decent chance of surviving, and a massive long tail of less popular works that were relatively obscure, especially over the time scale, didn’t get copied, and so therefore were lost. Of course we might get a few random selections from the long tail, but not many compared to the number of total works. I would have supposed there was easily a ratio of 100:1, at least.