Indeed it's a great missing link, it's incredible we have this text survive at all. Surviving ancient texts are filled with references to other texts and we do

Indeed it's a great missing link, it's incredible we have this text survive at all. Surviving ancient texts are filled with references to other texts and we don't know most of them. To know what was written by Xenophon or Cicero or Lucretius is a happy result of everyone through centuries of labour who copied, preserved and protected these works. An Italian scholar in the 15th century, Bracciolini [0], was responsible for "rediscovering" and preserving many works after hunting for them in old libraries and monastic scriptoria simply by knowing about them through references. I'd love to learn about other such cases in non European history. [0] perhaps most famously De rerum natura by Lucretius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poggio_Bracciolini https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poggio_Bracciolini