Saturday, February 25, 2017

How many classical texts are there?

I've said this before, but we are sure lucky of having the wonderful texts from classical antiquity come down to us. But, lucky, by how much? How many texts do we have? Had I been asked this question not long ago I'd have guessed that maybe around 300, but now I see we much more than that.

Let's see:

Collection
Year Started
Published volumes
Language

Loeb Classical Library
1911
532
English
Collection des Universités de France (Collection Budé)
1920
>800
French
Bibliotheca Teubneriana
1849
2009 (?!)
German
Biblioteca Clásica Gredos
1977
411+
Spanish

There's usually some regret about how much we might have lost (eg from the Library of Alexandria), but I read somewhere that for the texts that were considered valuable, it was made sure to make copies out of them, so we can be confident that not only do we have hundreds of texts, but most belonging of the upper tiers as well.

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