/his/ — >tfw just learned that the Illiad and Oddysey are but a part

>>18525068 (OP)
The Iliad is so fucking good bros, it really is a same the rest are lost.

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>>18525068 (OP)
Lost works are so so tragic. I'm hoping for some gems from the Herculaneum Papyri, hopefully advances in AI/automation can lead to quicker transcription and eventual translation/interpretation

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>everything we know about the fall of Troy is from flashbacks in the Odyssey and the Aeneid

I'm in the exact same boat, like 3 days ago I finished the Iliad and was pissed that it didn't include Achilles' death, the Trojan Horse, or the Fall of Troy. Still enjoyed it greatly though, and I'm enjoying the Odyssey as well.

>>18525362
Proclus in book 2 of his work Chrestomathia preserved a summary of the Sack of Troy which reads as follows
>Next come two books of the Sack of Ilium, by Arctinus of Miletus with the following contents. The Trojans were suspicious of the wooden horse and standing round it debated what they ought to do. Some thought they ought to hurl it down from the rocks, others to burn it up, while others said they ought to dedicate it to Athena. At last this third opinion prevailed. Then they turned to mirth and feasting believing the war was at an end. But at this very time two serpents appeared and destroyed Laocoon and one of his two sons, a portent which so alarmed the followers of Aeneas that they withdrew to Ida. Sinon then raised the fire-signal to the Achaeans, having previously got into the city by pretence. The Greeks then sailed in from Tenedos, and those in the wooden horse came our and fell upon their enemies, killing many and storming the city. Neoptolemus kills Priam who had fled to the altar of Zeus Herceius; Menelaus finds Helen and takes her to the ships, after killing Deiphobus; and Aias the son of Ileus, while trying to drag Cassandra away by force, tears away with her the image of Athena. At this the Greeks are so enraged that they determine to stone Aias, who only escapes from the danger threatening him by taking refuge at the altar of Athena. The Greeks, after burning the city, sacrifice Polyxena at the tomb of Achilles: Odysseus murders Astyanax; Neoptolemus takes Andromache as his prize, and the remaining spoils are divided. Demophon and Acamas find Aethra and take her with them. Lastly the Greeks sail away and Athena plans to destroy them on the high seas.
There are other fragments of it too which you can read here https://www.theoi.com/Text/EpicCycle.html#SackIlium

>>18525068 (OP)
We're also missing all 4 poems of the Theban Cycle (Oedipodea, Thebaid, Epigoni, and Alcmeonis) as well as Eumelus of Corinth's Titanomachy poem. The later of which is the worst loss in my opinion as it was far more detailed then Hesiod’s account and went into detail over the specific battles and the roles each god played in the war, things we will never know since our source on them is lost. Interestingly, Eumelus also differed from Hesiod is certain areas according to the fragments of it we have, for example he placed Aether as the father of Uranus and the source of everything rather than Chaos, had Aegaeon (Briareus) ally with the titans, etc.

Admittedly, I find the idea of active, brilliant illumination (Aether) as the source of all existence rather than a murky abyss (Chaos) interesting because this concept actually lines up with certain ideas found in later mystery cults and philosophy.

>>18525068 (OP)
A lot of human sacrifice there.

>>18525068 (OP)
If it makes you feel better, only the Homeric epics are considered literary masterpieces for their writing and themes, which is why they endured. The rest are less interesting structurally and are closer to just plain retellings of events, and their summaries are known.
>>18525371
>and was pissed that it didn't include Achilles' death, the Trojan Horse, or the Fall of Troy.
The events of the entire epic cycle are known, which is why "adaptations" or "novelizations" of Illiad tend to stretch from Cypria to Iliupersis, and the Oddysey commonly includes a summary of Nostoi in popular culture. Telegony less so.

>>18525068 (OP)
99% of writing from antiquity is gone. Thank the christkeks

>>18526781
>Thank the christkeks
There's only so much they could do, when preserving texts required either
>a class of literate people working around the clock to copy writings onto new/recycled writing material (which itself is a scarce commodity)
>desert climates (how the timbuktu manuscripts survived)
>the writing medium itself is resistant to decay (how inscriptions and mesopotamian writings survived)

When you only have so much parchment to go around, some texts have to prioritized over others, and literature considered fundamental to education (secular or religious) took precedence over the Greco-Roman equivalent to BookTok slop

>>18526781
It was all doomed anyhow.
Unless you constantly rewrite/reprint paper books and scrolls, they often only have a lifespan of a few decades.
Ones that survive longer are usually printed on expensive vellum. And even they usually degrade away.
And that is when you don't have fires, floods, etc.

You would need a huge multicentury long program to repeatedly recopy and refresh your library to preserve it for the next generation.

>>18526844
>Unless you constantly rewrite/reprint paper books and scrolls, they often only have a lifespan of a few decades.
Depends on the environment and especially humidity. Ancient Egyptian papyri, the Dead Sea Scrolls etc. survived for millenia.

>>18526818
>There's only so much they could do, when preserving texts required either
Actually pagan temples and certain philosophical academies (both of which were shut down by Christians) had already preserved a perfectly them fine for centuries even during crises and political instability. Pagan temples like the Serapeum didn’t just function as religious sites, but also as libraries and archives that held local histories, legal records, and technical manuals which Christians had zero interest in recopying. Many texts like the rest of the Epic Cycle, the Chaldean Oracles, or Varro’s 41-volume treatise on the Roman religion titled Antiquities of Human and Divine Things were intentionally discarded because the full works weren’t deemed “useful” to Christians, even if pagans considered them immensely valuable.
The texts we do have only survived because they were essential for teaching Greek and Latin grammar or rhetoric (Virgil was the standard for Latin and you needed Aristotle to win debates), not because Christians appreciated the content itself which was pagan and thus considered by Christians to be “demonic superstition. It’s less that Christianity “saved” the classics but rather they became the sole librarians after they helped dismantle the competition.
>inb4 “these institutions were already declining before Rome fell”
Except it was the onset of Christianity that caused their decline to begin with as. Christian emperors forcibly seized all their self-sustaining wealth like communists and redistributed them to churches and monasteries (which is something that the 4th century pagan historian Ammianus Marcellinus literally complained about), all while exempting Christian clergymen from taxes. Thus without a widespread community of pagan intellectuals to buy, trade, and request new copies of certain texts, the commercial market for non-Christian literature evaporated.
The simple fact is that no Christianity = no literary decline.

>>18526818
>>18526844
>heh, monks saved most pagan literature don't ya know?
>just ignore the fact that early Christian mobs burned books and destroyed sculptures
>WTFF how could these mudslimes convert the hagia Sophia into a mosque? Remove kebab!
>umm sweaty, those pagan temples would've fallen to ruin if we didn't pillage them and convert them into churches ya know?
Christcuck logic be like

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>a whole poem about niggers
Europe has been cucked since the beginning

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>>18526781
>>18526818
>>18526844
>>18525068 (OP)
Reminder it could even be worse

Bernardino de Sahagun
>...This...has happened to these Indians at the hands of the Spaniards...so...trampled...and destroyed, with all of their things, that no resemblance was left of what they were.... So now they are considered...barbarians...in reality, in matters of governance...they are far ahead of many other nations that presume to be...civilized. If even the little that has been found with great effort promises much profit, how much more might there be..."

Jose de Acosta
>...there is great knowledge...they [had[ letters and books, with which they preserved... the deeds of their ancestors...the distribution of time, and knowledge of plants and animals and other [natural things] as well as their ancient customs...the result of great...diligence. A missionary...thought that all of it must be witches’ spells...and insisted that they be burned...which was regretted...not only by the Indians but by curious Spaniards...The same fate has befallen other things, which...meant the loss of many...ancient and hidden things that might have been of...use

Diego de Landa
>These people...made use of certain characters...with which they wrote in their books their ancient matters and their sciences, and by these...they understood their affairs and...taught them. We found a large number of [these books]... and, as they contained nothing [that was not seen as]...lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and...caused them much affliction

Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl:
>I have always...desired to know...the historical events in this new world...no less important than those of the Romans, Greeks...However...their histories were...burned...everything within the royal archives...this was one of the greatest losses that these lands ever suffered....all the memories of their antiquity and other things that served as writings and records were destroyed at that time

>>18527442
great even more shit we have to thank christcucks for

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>>18527442
>The 16th-century Codex Mendoza states that one of the tributaries provided the (Aztec)Empire with 480,000 sheets of paper annually.
>at least 42 cities or towns served as designated paper manufacturing hubs
>Only about 20 to 24 original pre-Columbian Mesoamerican books survived the deliberate burnings by Spanish conquistadors and priests, with most bearing significant damage and degradation
I think about this and get upset about it on a near daily basis

>>18527442
They did this in Northern Europe too. Crazy how Nazis are vilified as the ultimate evil when Rome did much worse for hundreds and hundreds of years.

>>18527033
>had already preserved a perfectly them fine for centuries even during crises and political instability
So why didn't they survive the crisis of Christianity

>>18525068 (OP)
The other 6 books were lost because they sucked. Even in antiquity people said the Iliad and Odyssey were head and shoulders above the rest. Read the plot of the telegony it's kind of insane how stupid it is and how much it retroactively ruins the odyssey.

>>18526781
>99% of writing from antiquity is gone. Thank the christkeks
They're the only reason the 1% survived though.

>>18528403
Yeah, there's a reason Oddysus isn't seen a good light in the ancient world. His end wasn't good at all. But if you only read the Odessey you think other wise.

>>18525354
Unfortunately, AI is complete dog shit that can't produce anything unless a human has already produced it. It can produce amalgamations from huge quantities of human works and that's it. Relying on it for a translation of a yet-untranslated ancient work would be folly.

>>18528358
Because Christians’ goal was to specifically dismantle and destroy them while previous crises were indifferent to them. No shit that pagan archives and temples survived previous crises that weren’t focused on trying to destroy paganism.

>>18528405
>heh, monks saved most pagan literature don't ya know?
>just ignore the fact that early Christian mobs burned books and destroyed sculptures
>WTFF how could these mudslimes convert the hagia Sophia into a mosque? Remove kebab!
>umm sweaty, those pagan temples would've fallen to ruin if we didn't pillage them and convert them into churches ya know?
Christcuck logic be like

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>>18527442
>>18527465
Retarded fucking Spaniards. Makes my blood boil.

>>18527465
>The 16th-century Codex Mendoza states that one of the tributaries provided the (Aztec)Empire with 480,000 sheets of paper annually.

which province? do you have a specific source here?

>>18528487
>>18527465
Also for this line too

>at least 42 cities or towns served as designated paper manufacturing hubs

>>18528440
>just ignore the fact that early Christian mobs burned books
when did that happen?

>>18527442
You know what they say, you can take the nafri out of the mountains but you can't take the nafri out of the spaniard

>>18525068 (OP)
It keeps me up some nights.

>>18527033
That preservation you are talking about is overstated.
Even 18th and 19th century libraries were not properly climate controlled nor had maintenance performed on texts at a sufficient rate to avoid book loss.

>>18528487
>The 16th-century Codex Mendoza states
I'm no expert but I think his source is the 16th century Codex Mendoza

>>18529428
Right but I'm asking which province/folio of the codex

>>18528429
>going on about LLMs when the issue is about charred scrolls that can't be physically unrolled
please don't talk shit about machine learning when you don't even know that things outside of fucking LLMs exist
this is an equivalent task to protein folding which has dedicated scientific machine learning models except in this case what needs to be done is unfold fully carbonized scrolls instead
none of this has anything to do with the horribly compute inefficient hallucinating middle management-girlfriend simulator chatbots

>>18528765
MacMullen, R. Christianizing The Roman Empire A.D.100-400, Yale University Press, 1984, ISBN 0-300-03642-6
Chuvin, Pierre. A chronicle of the last pagans. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1990. London., pp.59-63. ISBN 9780674129702
You expect people to believe that early Christians who were just as worse as the jewish zealots in the jewish roman wars were heckin good boi chunguses who dindu nuffin and never burned any works of the pagan Romans and Greeks who wrote extensively on many subjects including religion?

>>18525068 (OP)
Considering they were written by different people in different times, what makes them a cycle exactly? Why those specifically? Surely those weren’t the only works written and lost after all.

>>18528424
He’s also devilishly clever, brave and heroic in Iliad.

>>18529912
Ancient sources group them together

>>18528437
Why didn't the pagans take their sacred texts and hide out in the wilderness and keep their traditions alive

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>>18526781
>Sorry bit no sorry
t. comet

>>18529756
I don't have either of those books available. Can you provide pictures of pgs 59-63 of the second one, and whatever pages support your argument from the first one?

As to your "argument" below your sources, I have done no such thing. I merely asked you to back up your claim. Can you do that?

>>18530825
They did hide out in the rural areas of the roman empire. That's where the term pagan comes from. Just like how christcucks today can't compete with atheists in western metropolitan cities and hide out in the countryside in shame

>>18531009
>I don't have those books heh, spoonfeed me
Pirate them. You call yourself an anon but you can't find a single book but you act smug about your feeblemindedness. Christians are like leftists, they pretend to not understand things making any sort of discourse impossible
>https://archive.org/details/chronicleoflastp0000chuv
Just for you my insidious christcuck. Either make an account or find them on zlib

>>18525068 (OP)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_literary_works

>>18525371
You should read the Posthomerica, it's a later epic that picks up immediately after the Iliad and goes all the way to the sack of Troy.

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>>18525068 (OP)
>>18525371
There's other works that cover what these lost epics said.

>>18525362
*WRONG ANSWER BUZZER*

The sack of Troy was constantly retold and referenced in different versions.

>>18525068 (OP)
Based on this, there is no way the Iliad and Odyssey was written by the same guy. The whole cycle is this epic story of the clash of major powers and rulers of the Eastern Mediterranean, which seems to conclude with part 6 (the Greeks return home and their leaders get punished by the Gods for their sins during the war).

And then the Odyssey is about this one side character, who is king of just some pissant island, and his adventures years after the war. It's obvious that someone wrote basically fanfiction of his favorite character, probably because Odysseus was the writer or his employers' ancestor.

>>18531461
None of the poets invented these stories. What they did was they took several pre-existing oral myths about the Trojan War and spun them into more cohesive narratives.

>>18525068 (OP)
Shouldn't this prove the Trojan war happened? No way 8 poets agreed to create the same story in order.

>>18531498
Read this >>18531492
Funnily enough though, there is evidence to suggest that the Trojan War is based on a distorted memory of a real conflict that happened at the end of the Bronze Age (around the time period the Ancient Greeks dated the Trojan War to).
https://desuarchive.org/his/thread/17930853/#17931652