“James, what do you know of the ancient writers that didn’t make it; how many, how old, why?”

-Mister Gray, August 9 2025, by phone

How Many

Of philosophers teaching before Plato in about 380 B.C., all we have is Solon, and only fragments. Thales of Miletus, who Herodotus says published astronomical findings about an upcoming eclipse of the sun in about 670 B.C., an eclipse mentioned by Archilochus, a poet of that time, only third hand mentions exists. We know he died of sun stroke watching the Olympic Agon in old age. The problem with philosophers is that they taught a small circle of men verbally. Aristotle appears to have written nothing that survived him, the text we have courtesy of Theophrastus. Socrates, three generations before, only survives in the writing of Plato. 500 years later, Epictetus survives in the writing of Arrian.

Poetry seems to have had the best chance of surviving, as it, by its structure, encourages verbal memorization. Even then, most of the Trojan War lore is lost to us, with only three books describing the final days of that struggle, one focused mostly on the aftermath.

Prophecies appear not to have been written, except as historical relations by historians relating the sacred answer from Delphi. There, we have only the records of two of the many oracles, a few Delphic and one Libyan to Alexander’s question.

Epigrams and letters are mostly lost. We have only small fragments of Simonides The Younger of Ceos, for he was popular and wrote for individuals and communities who did not survive. The Odes that do survive are mostly those of Pindar, of the next generation. I think this is in large part because Alexander, after permitting the erasure of Thebes, declared that Pindar’s legacy would be respected.

Menander, a prolific playwright and epigramist, has had most of his work lost. One line of and ode to Euthymus survives of what have might been a hero saga.

In many cases a popular worker in words seems to have been lost to us based on that very fact. Perhaps this reflects the hoarding of their works in central locations, as the major libraries of Alexandria, Pergamum, Athens and Constantinople faced age ending disasters. As it is, we are lucky so much has survived. For instance, Vienna preserved works rescued from Constantinople—then Vienna almost fell twice in the two following centuries.

I think we are looking at the works that touched the heart of a scribe, of a man with no talent himself, but simply the artifice of writing that wished to help his favorite authors be appreciated down through Time. The body of work that we lack, is, I think, a thousand fold what we have. Edward Gibbon, opined that we were bequeathed more than could be expected, more than we deserved, and far more than we would heed of the lessons of antiquity.

Let me give three examples.

-1. Herodotus, cites entire orders of record keeping priests of Persia and Egypt who have been silenced by time other than his mentions. There is one small Greek state, I believe a colony of Dorians, who he mentions, and then declines to write about as so many earlier authors have "treated on this subject.” Herodotus, who we are told was the first, and most flawed historian, demonstrates the use of official sources from opposing powers as well as folklore, and eye witness sources from opposing and neutral powers concerning the “feud” between Asia and Europe that was the subject of his work. He presents sources that he “does not credit,” but leaves it for the reader to decide. His work remains intact, though he mentions numerous specific works that are lost beyond the general crowd of lore keepers and chroniclers.

I see conspiracy in two places here: the ancient editors who decided that no inquirer earlier than Herodotus, of which there were “many,” should be preserved. This decision was most likely made in Athens. I think that the fact that Xenophon, a minor writer by his account, has such a wide body of surviving work, goes back to the academics at Athens in the A.D. 100s thru 400s having a local bias. Additionally, since these academics, these curators, were the creatures of bankers and emperors, that the survival of lessons out of the past that might reveal the actions of the predecessors of their patrons, who act alike as a class, down through Time, should not be spotlighted.

Then there are the modern voices, the academics, who which us to believe that only the local Athenian historian Thucydides is to be trusted, when he showed total respect for Herodotus. Sephyr, in one of the last entries of this book, will provide us with some perspective here, in that in 323 B.C. a secret international society of academics and financiers seem to have joined in a conspiracy to discredit any head-of-state who might defy their influence.

-2. Arrian, who lived in the Age of Curation, when the Romans were deciding what Ancient Greek texts would survive, under the advice of international minded Greek scholars, chiefly of Athens, where the death sentence had been passed upon Socrates in 401 and Aristotle in 323, is a deft guide. He served as mayor of Athens and dean of the Academy and let no word of conspiracy escape his lips concerning the obvious murder of Alexander. In that history, he cites the following sources that are no longer extant: Ptolemy, Aristobulus, Nearchus, all generals of Alexander, the Official Diary by Callisthenes and his successor after Alexander found that man conspiring to murder him along with Asian agents, and “popular tradition,” all of which was lost in rough form and only exists in the works of Rufus, Diodurus, Plutarch and Arrian as unsupported assertions and in the mostly Asiatic “romances.” As a man who has written hundreds of books, and has been overtly [by book bans] and covertly [by meeting with three government gunmen now over 7 years], I understand when a writer uses subtextual and text compression techniques to obscure the truthes he wishes to preserve from the crude ontrolling eye of the men of power. I, like Arrian and Herodotus, write for my counterpart down through time. I not only wish to avoid detection by my evil masters, but also wish to preserve my work so that writers of the future, and perhaps a few readers who exceed my cognition level, will be able to find the truth hidden form the goons with guns, and in Arrian’s time, the goons with poison cups.

-3. Finally, a brilliant book titled Pytheas the Greek, by Barry Cunliffe, details how a mariner, an ancient James Cook of Magellan, who sailed to Thule, has had his lost journal preserved through oblique references in later antiquity. This man sailed in about 330, when the Greek world, including Alexander and Nearchus, were manically seeking to discover the full extent of our world. I suggest Cunliffe’s book for those more deeply interested in this subject.

Conclusion

I do suggest that Oswald Spengler was correct when eh mentioned that every book of antiquity, that was not copied, represented a conscious decision, by a curator, probably of the A.D. 400s, not to copy it and let Khronos take it to dust. Gibbon makes a good case, particularly in his Rise of Islam chapter, that the various destructions of libraries in Alexandria were not as total as has been suggested and that other libraries were extant under the Greek Romans down through the mid 1400s. I, therefore, with only absence of evidence as evidence, suggest that the greatest conspiracy against us has been the decisions, as in early American history, not to preserve documents that demonstrate the studied iniquity of Those in Power. For, Those in power, are brilliant, and know that they have only one counterpart, and that they share methods with but one body of people, those Who Were in Power. For us to read how their predecessors maintained control, would be a cink in their armor.