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graphic and textual analysis of surviving Late Antique and Medieval codi- ces, charters, and other documents. As a result of this immense loss, what is known is probably much less than what may never be known. The survival or loss of specific documents may be researched on a case by case basis. From time to time discoveries are made, expanding slightly the limitations of our knowledge. Nor can surviving texts adequately explain the extent or causes of what was lost. For example, Pliny’s Historia naturalis, an unusually long Roman encyclopedic text which remained in circulation, though usual- ly not in “complete” form, through the Middle Ages, refers to a great many Roman authors whose texts did not survive, and it might be tempting to investigate why certain texts survived rather than others. But as much as we might seek causes specific to the loss of a certain text or a library that pre- served many texts, the gradual overall deterioration of institutions, and the waning of traditional education in the classics during the decline of the Ro- man Empire and the Early Middle Ages, were primary causes of the loss of many ancient manuscripts, and the reason for the fragmentary nature of so much of our knowledge of ancient civilization and literature. We know that an enormous amount was lost, but we cannot quantify the loss accurately or qualitatively. Estimates of the percentage of classical literature that may have survived to the present vary; one widely used estimate is only ten percent.85
The problem was not so much large-scale physical destruction of books, though there was enough of that from fires and from repeated sackings during the barbarian invasions, but as the Roman army, government offi- cials, and business classes assumed the styles and customs of the conquering Ostrogoths and later the Lombards, Roman civilization faded, Roman edu- cation gradually diminished, and the body of literature studied and revered by the educated in Antiquity ceased to be read, cherished, and most of all, ceased to be copied, distributed and preserved. With the dwindling of the senatorial class or Roman upper class, which had been the traditional
85 See Reynolds & Wilson, Scribes & Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek & Latin Literature, 3rd ed. (1991). For studies of the impact of these losses and the challenges of reconstructing classical texts see Reynolds (ed.), Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics (1983).
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