[quotemstr]

Aeschylus did great work, winning prize after prize in playwriting competitions. Only seven of his 90 or so plays survive. It'd be great to read the rest of this work and there's no particular reason to believe it's of low quality.

[periphrasis]

Yeah, I was about to make the exact same comment albeit mentioning Sophocles and his roughly 120 plays.

If you’re into classical literature, what was lost can be extremely tantalizing. I read Cicero’s De Re Publica recently, of which only about 35-ish% survived. What’s there is so interesting, both for what it says about the structure of the Roman republic as it existed, and what an educated traditional Roman of the senatorial class thought about how best to structure society and government. The concluding Dream of Scipio is enough to make you cry, not just for its extreme beauty and elegiac tone, but also for the fact that the dialogue it concludes only came down to us in a mutilated state.

While much of what was lost was surely dross, we also lost some of the great achievements of human culture too.

[tragomaskhalos]

This quote from the great Carl Sagan, concerning the library of Alexandria but generally applicable: "We do know that of the 123 plays of Sophocles in the Library, only 7 survived. One of those seven is Oedipus Rex. Similar numbers apply to the works of Aeschylus and Euripides. It is a little as if the only surviving works of a man named William Shakespeare were Coriolanus and A Winter’s Tale, but we had heard that he had written certain other plays, unknown to us but apparently prized in his time – works entitled Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet."

[quickthrowman]

> If you’re into classical literature, what was lost can be extremely tantalizing.

I would very much like to read Suetonius’ Lives of Famous Whores and would bet I’m not the only one.

[sramsay]

Or Diogenes’ On Farting.

[867-5309]

and Steinbacchus' Of Nice Women

[User23]

I don’t disagree. Back then copying manuscripts was exceedingly expensive, so it’s not unreasonable to suppose that the other 83 were good, but insufficiently so for enough copies to be made to assure survival.

At least we have Bignose’s[1] pickup and breakup manuals.

[1] Publius Ovidius Naso