5 ms·

Most important part of the linked article: "The bar for notability or even remembrance is simply much lower for recent history."

• _delirium 12y ago
  An interesting intersection of those is that the bar for notability is really low for ancient history, if any information is available. Minor people about whom some documentation has survived are interesting to historians, simply because the number of ancient Greeks who we know by name and about whom any information has survived is small, so essentially all of them are of interest to historians. Same with texts: every ancient surviving poem is at least somewhat notable and has some study of it (even surviving poem fragments), which is definitely not the case with every surviving poem from 1995.
  • rooneel 12y ago
    True that, but if you were writing poems in say, ancient Greece, you likely weren't Little Billy writing love ballads to Susan from across the street. That someone was writings poems itself makes them notable than their compadres.
    • x1798DE 12y ago
      There's this woman, Allia Potestas [1], who is notable just because we happen to have her epitaph, and the epitaph happens to mention details of some sort of polyandrous relationship configuration that she had. I doubt she would be notable if she lived today. Additionally, I'm pretty sure that poetry in Ancient Greece was if anything more commonplace than it is today, and not necessarily some high action of the literati. I think we're used to a world where the marginal cost of reproducing creative works is very low, so everyone can hear the same songs and read the same books as everyone else - before the era of easy reproduction, I think you had a lot more "local talent" generating their own little poems, songs, plays, etc. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allia_Potestas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allia_Potestas