Do we know why so much of Xenophon survived? I can well imagine Plato's sect perpetuating his writings and others beyond as he became *the* reference for the emergence of philosophy. Much of Aristotle's work is lost and what we have allegedly survived in a barrel and later reemerged. But why so much Xenophon? (Not that I am complaining.)
If literature was a toolkit, Xenophon’s corpus is almost a Swiss-army knife of utility. One can tinker with philosophy through most of his works, and his apprenticeship with Socrates certainly gains him acclaim in that regard. But Xenophon was more than a philosopher.
His writings on his service as a mercenary general of the Achaemenid Empire provides readers timeless information about various military tactics alongside historical and cultural knowledge about the ancient Persians. Indeed, his international life reflected in his writings are useful for history students of Persia, Ionia, Athens, and Sparta. Xenophon may be considered as much as a historian as a philosopher.
Xenophon’s historical and philosophical materials were blended in a method of writing that influenced the development of historiography writ large. People in the future writing about philosophy and history, and all the political and military topics those subjects encompass, were then writing in a genre shaped by Xenophon.
Given my argument that Greek texts survived because of their utility, Xenophon’s writings had a chance to survive because no matter what the contemporary interest was at the time, there was likely to be a relevant utility in Xenophon’s works. Beyond that, Xenophon discusses individuals (often in a unique biographical way) who are famous (or useful) in their own ways, like Socrates, which leads people to find and read and copy Xenophon in service of those other people or topics. Conversely, his works having survived the few centuries following his life, Xenophon himself is cited by people like Zeno of Citium and Cicero, so people interested in Stoicism and Rhetoric may have sought out Xenophon to understand the reference.
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I was curious about the quantity of Xenophon’s surviving texts so did some basic searching. There are about 15,000 digitized Greek manuscripts (out of 60-70,000 in total), and 97 of those digitized manuscripts contain Xenophon’s writings. Comparing this 97 to authors close to Xenophon in subject and time period: there are 223 for Plato, 791 for Aristotle, 29 for Herodotus, and 54 for Thucydides. Interestingly, Xenophon is in between the two pairs of philosophers and historians. The vast majority of these manuscripts are from the 14th and 15th centuries, but an interesting data point nonetheless.
As for Aristotle’s works being lost until they were discovered in a barrel, I don’t think that’s true. Aristotle is likely the pre-Christian ancient Greek author whose texts have survived in the most diffused and proliferated nature. Unlike most ancient Greek authors there are very few periods or even locations where at least some of Aristotle’s corpus was not known. Even between the 6-12th centuries when most Greek authors were lost in non-Iberian Western Europe, there were a few surviving texts of Aristotle in a Latin translation. But his works survived in Greek, Syriac, and Arabic elsewhere. I'd be curious to hear more about the texts being recovered in a barrel as I haven't heard about that.
Re: Aristotle: all of Aristotle's fictional works (e.g. dialogues) are lost. Cicero says these were very beautiful, which the surviving works (as much as I like them) are not.
I like Xenophon a lot but he is arguably not "profound." It's interesting that only Xenophon and Plato have surviving Socratic dialogues, though apparently many others wrote some as well.
"in perfect conditions their microfilm can last up to 500 years"
Perhaps quartz will provide a more durable "window" into the past. In one advanced application, quartz can preserve info in "five-dimensional data storage", with data density about 10,000 times greater than that of a Blu-Ray disc. Even at such extreme density, the data is secure within the quartz disc for billions of years.
One such disc was placed in the glove compartment of Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster, prior to the car's interplanetary launch aboard the first Falcon Heavy. The disc contains Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy, plus instructions for decoding.
“the rotten tree-trunk, until the very moment when the storm-blast breaks it in two, has all the appearance of might it ever had.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation
Hypothetically, if you could fill a disc to its 360 TB capacity and secure copies wherever needed, how might you structure that disc's content to enable a fast and successful "civilization bootstrap"?
Billions of years of lifespan for this technology seems like a tall claim, but even if it was magnitudes less than that it’s difficult to verify data integrity over time. Even if it were to survive that long, there are potential issues with user readability from this medium. Beyond that, the write speed onto these discs is currently excruciatingly slow which means copying 360TB would be an expensive and demanding endeavour.
But let’s hand wave all those drawbacks away for now. If the technology, forethought, and funds are available to dedicate to a comprehensive project to conserve Greek texts then in this scenario there must be enough interest and perceived utility in the texts at the hypothetical ‘present’ moment already, meaning the texts would actively be in circulation and would survive for the short-term future without this endeavor. Therefore, the point of this storage of the texts is presupposing a complete break in the chain of transmission somewhere in the medium to long-term future.
The creation of this disc, then, would purely be in the service of unknowable future people, to help them appreciate human heritage in the form of Greek texts, or even a more encompassing civilizational bootstrap as you termed it. Or would it? Would this disc not still be a tool in service of addressing present needs, just as every copy of a Greek text has been? Having made the troubling conclusion that Greek texts or civilization itself will surely disappear in the future such that this disc is necessary to preserve an element of the human condition, it appears to me that the creators would be seeking to alleviate (or attempt a grand claim about) present challenges in one or more fields of statecraft, politics, religion, or -- given the “billions-of-years” lifespan -- quandaries about our own mortality.
How would the desired utility at this desperate moment influence the selection of the texts, their formats, their languages, their contextual histories and notes, the metadata of this repository, and the overall format and structure of the disc? Editors and scholars have had to make these decisions each time they copy even a single piece of Greek literature. Greek ‘texts’ are made up of far more than just words on the page and no amount of storage can include the near infinitude needed to capture the millennia of human experience in the thread of Greek scholarship. This is why ongoing engagement with the texts seems a safer bet at truly preserving Greek literature than the Hail Mary method of burying a disc in a remote cave or chucking it into space.
I’m certainly not qualified to discuss how to bootstrap a civilization, but imagining a disc that would theoretically contain the instructions to allow people to re-build our past few thousand years of civilization seems hubristic. If one has the audacity and is well-equipped enough to create this disc-guide on re-designing an entire civilization in the far-flung future, they seem to be in a position where they might be better off placing their confidence in attempting to prevent this hypothetical downfall in the first place.
And yes, such a disc would need to be "a tool in service of addressing present needs, just as every copy of a Greek text has been". An encompassing self-help guide, even.
The longer the collapse, the more alienated the future audience. An English curriculum will still be readable and comprehensible in 100 years, if carefully composed. But in 10,000? Perhaps the disc should bootstrap ESL also, for distant audience.
Not that I have particular expectation there; distant speculation can't carry much weight. Maybe the thought experiment is more useful for our own time, as a way of highlighting gaps in our own education. In that vein, I've always liked the structure of "Great Treasury of Western Thought". The chronological presentation of topics gives a sense of continuity and development in the quoted texts. It's a nice way to discover authors, too: you're exploring an interesting topic and some new voice pipes up, recasting the topic with an unexpected turn of phrase.
"prevent this hypothetical downfall" with "ongoing engagement with the texts"
Understood. Downfall is "psychological" initially, with falsehoods taking root, etc. So much effort is needed, even now, to clear out the worst falsehoods. Yet today so little is actually done, where it counts.
Arguably, our psychological downfall is near-complete in the U.S. E.g., the humanities are denigrated in public life, and even on most campuses, as a matter of policy. If you try to apply the discipline of the humanities to expose and remedy, say, the worst abuses of State organs, you get shouted down, or worse. Most live in fear of that "worse", because many ignorant men are eager to inflict it, as witting or unwitting agents of the State.
Objectively, we see this today. And if I might ask: historically, what comes next?
Do we know why so much of Xenophon survived? I can well imagine Plato's sect perpetuating his writings and others beyond as he became *the* reference for the emergence of philosophy. Much of Aristotle's work is lost and what we have allegedly survived in a barrel and later reemerged. But why so much Xenophon? (Not that I am complaining.)
If literature was a toolkit, Xenophon’s corpus is almost a Swiss-army knife of utility. One can tinker with philosophy through most of his works, and his apprenticeship with Socrates certainly gains him acclaim in that regard. But Xenophon was more than a philosopher.
His writings on his service as a mercenary general of the Achaemenid Empire provides readers timeless information about various military tactics alongside historical and cultural knowledge about the ancient Persians. Indeed, his international life reflected in his writings are useful for history students of Persia, Ionia, Athens, and Sparta. Xenophon may be considered as much as a historian as a philosopher.
Xenophon’s historical and philosophical materials were blended in a method of writing that influenced the development of historiography writ large. People in the future writing about philosophy and history, and all the political and military topics those subjects encompass, were then writing in a genre shaped by Xenophon.
Given my argument that Greek texts survived because of their utility, Xenophon’s writings had a chance to survive because no matter what the contemporary interest was at the time, there was likely to be a relevant utility in Xenophon’s works. Beyond that, Xenophon discusses individuals (often in a unique biographical way) who are famous (or useful) in their own ways, like Socrates, which leads people to find and read and copy Xenophon in service of those other people or topics. Conversely, his works having survived the few centuries following his life, Xenophon himself is cited by people like Zeno of Citium and Cicero, so people interested in Stoicism and Rhetoric may have sought out Xenophon to understand the reference.
--
I was curious about the quantity of Xenophon’s surviving texts so did some basic searching. There are about 15,000 digitized Greek manuscripts (out of 60-70,000 in total), and 97 of those digitized manuscripts contain Xenophon’s writings. Comparing this 97 to authors close to Xenophon in subject and time period: there are 223 for Plato, 791 for Aristotle, 29 for Herodotus, and 54 for Thucydides. Interestingly, Xenophon is in between the two pairs of philosophers and historians. The vast majority of these manuscripts are from the 14th and 15th centuries, but an interesting data point nonetheless.
As for Aristotle’s works being lost until they were discovered in a barrel, I don’t think that’s true. Aristotle is likely the pre-Christian ancient Greek author whose texts have survived in the most diffused and proliferated nature. Unlike most ancient Greek authors there are very few periods or even locations where at least some of Aristotle’s corpus was not known. Even between the 6-12th centuries when most Greek authors were lost in non-Iberian Western Europe, there were a few surviving texts of Aristotle in a Latin translation. But his works survived in Greek, Syriac, and Arabic elsewhere. I'd be curious to hear more about the texts being recovered in a barrel as I haven't heard about that.
Re: Aristotle: all of Aristotle's fictional works (e.g. dialogues) are lost. Cicero says these were very beautiful, which the surviving works (as much as I like them) are not.
I like Xenophon a lot but he is arguably not "profound." It's interesting that only Xenophon and Plato have surviving Socratic dialogues, though apparently many others wrote some as well.
"in perfect conditions their microfilm can last up to 500 years"
Perhaps quartz will provide a more durable "window" into the past. In one advanced application, quartz can preserve info in "five-dimensional data storage", with data density about 10,000 times greater than that of a Blu-Ray disc. Even at such extreme density, the data is secure within the quartz disc for billions of years.
https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/quartz-disk-5d-storage-52543/
One such disc was placed in the glove compartment of Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster, prior to the car's interplanetary launch aboard the first Falcon Heavy. The disc contains Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy, plus instructions for decoding.
https://www.archmission.org/tesla-roadster
“the rotten tree-trunk, until the very moment when the storm-blast breaks it in two, has all the appearance of might it ever had.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation
Hypothetically, if you could fill a disc to its 360 TB capacity and secure copies wherever needed, how might you structure that disc's content to enable a fast and successful "civilization bootstrap"?
This is an interesting thought experiment.
Billions of years of lifespan for this technology seems like a tall claim, but even if it was magnitudes less than that it’s difficult to verify data integrity over time. Even if it were to survive that long, there are potential issues with user readability from this medium. Beyond that, the write speed onto these discs is currently excruciatingly slow which means copying 360TB would be an expensive and demanding endeavour.
But let’s hand wave all those drawbacks away for now. If the technology, forethought, and funds are available to dedicate to a comprehensive project to conserve Greek texts then in this scenario there must be enough interest and perceived utility in the texts at the hypothetical ‘present’ moment already, meaning the texts would actively be in circulation and would survive for the short-term future without this endeavor. Therefore, the point of this storage of the texts is presupposing a complete break in the chain of transmission somewhere in the medium to long-term future.
The creation of this disc, then, would purely be in the service of unknowable future people, to help them appreciate human heritage in the form of Greek texts, or even a more encompassing civilizational bootstrap as you termed it. Or would it? Would this disc not still be a tool in service of addressing present needs, just as every copy of a Greek text has been? Having made the troubling conclusion that Greek texts or civilization itself will surely disappear in the future such that this disc is necessary to preserve an element of the human condition, it appears to me that the creators would be seeking to alleviate (or attempt a grand claim about) present challenges in one or more fields of statecraft, politics, religion, or -- given the “billions-of-years” lifespan -- quandaries about our own mortality.
How would the desired utility at this desperate moment influence the selection of the texts, their formats, their languages, their contextual histories and notes, the metadata of this repository, and the overall format and structure of the disc? Editors and scholars have had to make these decisions each time they copy even a single piece of Greek literature. Greek ‘texts’ are made up of far more than just words on the page and no amount of storage can include the near infinitude needed to capture the millennia of human experience in the thread of Greek scholarship. This is why ongoing engagement with the texts seems a safer bet at truly preserving Greek literature than the Hail Mary method of burying a disc in a remote cave or chucking it into space.
I’m certainly not qualified to discuss how to bootstrap a civilization, but imagining a disc that would theoretically contain the instructions to allow people to re-build our past few thousand years of civilization seems hubristic. If one has the audacity and is well-equipped enough to create this disc-guide on re-designing an entire civilization in the far-flung future, they seem to be in a position where they might be better off placing their confidence in attempting to prevent this hypothetical downfall in the first place.
Thanks, good points.
And yes, such a disc would need to be "a tool in service of addressing present needs, just as every copy of a Greek text has been". An encompassing self-help guide, even.
The longer the collapse, the more alienated the future audience. An English curriculum will still be readable and comprehensible in 100 years, if carefully composed. But in 10,000? Perhaps the disc should bootstrap ESL also, for distant audience.
Not that I have particular expectation there; distant speculation can't carry much weight. Maybe the thought experiment is more useful for our own time, as a way of highlighting gaps in our own education. In that vein, I've always liked the structure of "Great Treasury of Western Thought". The chronological presentation of topics gives a sense of continuity and development in the quoted texts. It's a nice way to discover authors, too: you're exploring an interesting topic and some new voice pipes up, recasting the topic with an unexpected turn of phrase.
"prevent this hypothetical downfall" with "ongoing engagement with the texts"
Understood. Downfall is "psychological" initially, with falsehoods taking root, etc. So much effort is needed, even now, to clear out the worst falsehoods. Yet today so little is actually done, where it counts.
Arguably, our psychological downfall is near-complete in the U.S. E.g., the humanities are denigrated in public life, and even on most campuses, as a matter of policy. If you try to apply the discipline of the humanities to expose and remedy, say, the worst abuses of State organs, you get shouted down, or worse. Most live in fear of that "worse", because many ignorant men are eager to inflict it, as witting or unwitting agents of the State.
Objectively, we see this today. And if I might ask: historically, what comes next?
Ah. "Equity-based book weeding": that's what comes next, apparently.
"Report: Some Canadian School Libraries Ban All Books Published Prior to 2008 in ‘Equity-Based’ Weeding Process"
"When you talk to the librarian..., the books are being weeded by the date, no other criteria..."
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/09/15/report-some-canadian-school-libraries-erased-books-published-prior-2008/