4 ms·

This article would tend to lead one to suppose that more Latin than Greek texts have been preserved from the classical period, because it describes better condi

This article would tend to lead one to suppose that more Latin than Greek texts have been preserved from the classical period, because it describes better conditions for preservation in the West than in the East, but I've heard that the opposite is true.

pixodaros 4y ago
If you read the post, it says that Ottoman and European imperialism disrupted the institutions which had preserved pagan Greek literature until then. This part is really really ugly, because it was in the 15th century, after doing everything they could to pick apart the East Roman Empire for hundreds of years and creating the situation which let the Ottomans take over, that Italians decided that actually the pagan Greek classics were cool and started collecting manuscripts, learning Classical Greek, and making their own copies and eventually printed editions. It was rather like how anthropologists emerged in the the early 20th century to 'preserve' the indigenous cultures which the anthropologists' relatives had been taking apart. Catholic Europeans did a lot to preserve pagan Greek literature (mainly after 1400), and Catholic Europeans destroyed a lot of pagan Greek literature (mainly before 1453), and that is not a story which many people want to hear.