What Lost Ancient Work Would You Most Like To Read?

[jimmy olsen]

Inspired by this article.

Personally, that history of the Etruscans sounds the best of what's listed here. However, I would probably chose a lost biblical text myself, or the plays of Aeschylus or Sophocles.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/quora/2016/03/06/what_lost_ancient_work_would_historians_most_like_to_recover.html

What Lost Ancient Work Would Historians Most Like to Recover?

By Quora Contributor


Asking for just one is not very fair. Some possible contenders:


The emperor Claudius was a prolific scholar who wrote a book of dice games, a history of the reign of Augustus, and a number of other works, none of which survive. But the lost works of his I would most like to read are his eight-volume history of Carthage, his dictionary of the Etruscan language, and his multivolume history of the Etruscans. Virtually everything we know about the Etruscans and Carthaginians comes from the perspective of their wars with Rome, and the Etrsucan language is known only through inscriptions, few of which are of any length. A full dictionary of Etruscan words with their Latin equivalents would go a long way toward solving the mystery of where this language (and its people) came from and if it was an Indo-European language like Latin, a Middle Eastern language like Carthaginian, or something much older.


If Suetonius' gossipy The Twelve Caesars is anything to go on, his lost work On the Lives of Famous Whores would be a good read. So would his book Greek Terms of Abuse.

Pliny the Elder wrote a twelve-volume book on the Germanic wars of Augustus and his successors that is now known only in some scattered quotes in Tacitus' Histories and Germania.

Charlemagne had a whole book of ancient Germanic epic poetry that unfortunately his son destroyed because the stories in it were "pagan."  It's likely that the earliest forms of stories we only know via mentions in later poetry like Beowulf and the Nibelungslied about heroes like Sigurd, Theodoric, Weland, Widia, and Hama, as well as early forms of sagas about Attila and other heroes of the Migration Era were in this lost book.

[Eddie Teach]

I'm shocked that Tim is uninterested in the Lives of Famous Whores. Shocked.

[jimmy olsen]

I'm shocked that Tim is uninterested in the Lives of Famous Whores. Shocked.

Seeing that I have already read a book about Prostitution in Ancient Greece, I would be interested in reading that book. However, I'd be in interested in almost all of the books listed above. The point of this is to just choose one book.

[celedhring]

The complete Poetics from Aristotle. We only have half of it and it's the single most influential work ever written, in my line of work.

[Grinning_Colossus]

All of Sophocles would be great. Or maybe the Sibylline Books or the crappy forgotten parts of the Epic Cycle.

[Queequeg]

I'd like to know more about pre-Indo European Europe, so the Etruscans would be great.  Some kind of good text from Slavic mythology would be wonderful, same as the Scytho-Sarmatians.  I'd like a lot more texts from early Germanic, as I think there's a real chance that, contra Hitler, the Germanic languages are basically a mongrelized version of the Slavo-Baltic languages as Proto-Germanic is kind of freaky. 

[Agelastus]

Toss up between Ptolemy's work on Alexander or Hieronymus of Cardia's work on the Diadochoi.

Although Claudius' work on the Etruscans would probably be a top 5 choice.

[Savonarola]

The complete Poetics from Aristotle. We only have half of it and it's the single most influential work ever written, in my line of work.

Either this or the dialogues of Aristotle.

[PDH]

Jesus's diary.

[Razgovory]

I'd be really neat if all those pre-Columbian documents weren't destroyed.  And while not technically lost, It would cool if someone could translate Linear A Minoan documents.  While they probably are just about storage, we could at least disocover the affinity of the language.

[Capetan Mihali]

Jesus's diary.

Not grumbler's?

[Scipio]

Livy's remaining books of the History of Rome.

[alfred russel]

Any lost manuscript from Tom Clancy would be my choice.

[PDH]

Jesus's diary.

Not grumbler's?

I heard the first 150,000 years was pre-language.  Booooring.

[Capetan Mihali]

Any lost manuscript from Tom Clancy would be my choice.

Or those ones Richard Bachman misplaced.