Brian Chandler wrote: > Dunno, but it's a truly crazy idea. Film degenerates; numbers don't. > Why do you suppose we still have Greek literature, but only shadows of > the painting and sculpture.
Brian,
It doesn't sound like you've looked too deeply into how we have the Greek lit to which you refer. Every scrap of it comes to your hands in the same way as the reconstructions of all ancient art. Scholars, linguists and archeologists with little better to do have gathered up all the bits and pieces (fragments) they can find of what seem to be the original handmade copies, reassembled from these like jigsaw puzzles what seem to be the most reliable versions, and then spent years comparing them to other already known works and ancient translations of the same and have come up with what seem to be the most reasonable translations that you and I might understand.
But here's the added problem. While the hand made inks on those parchments and papyri do fade, the media on which it is written also deteriorates and crumbles leaving great gaps and wholes in the pieces we have. Occasionally complete manuscripts have been found, such as some of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the works of the historian Josephus and others. But the majority of these are themselves either extremely fragile taking years to unroll, let alone translate, or they are unreliable, very late copies of copies of copies, every one hand written and include the errors of fatigue, whim and interpretation of the scribe. In any case, the best of what we have of ancient literature are copies of interpreted copies of fragments.
OTOH, the works of art to which you referred, though degraded, broken and with parts missing, are themselves original. With these, once any pieces are reassembled we have something much closer to what the artist saw than even the best of the literary works available to us.
Peace! Sidney
