According to the fourth century Christian writer Jerome, Annals and History, the two main works written by Tacitus consisted of a total of thirty books. About half of this historical dilogy has come down to us.
Lost, for example, descriptions of events that took place from mid-March 37 AD until the beginning of 47, that is, during the reign of Caligula (a fatal era for Rome!) And in the first years of Claudius's rule.
Lost, most importantly, is the story of Domitian's reign, of which Tacitus himself was an angry witness. From a short reservation he threw in "The Life of Julius Agricola", one can guess what the TA story was: "Just as our ancestors witnessed the extent to which freedom can go, so we saw the last degree of slavery." Alas, these formidable invectives disappeared without a trace in the darkness of centuries.
The ancient Egyptians, from almost 3000 BC, meticulously kept records of the most important events that took place in the country, and also noted the water level in the Nile during the flood. Only scant remnants of these texts from the first five dynasties (about 3000 - about 2400 BC) have survived to us. However, these records raise more questions than they shed light on the past of the land of the pharaohs.
The Egyptian priest Manetho at the beginning of the 3rd century BC compiled the "Egyptian Chronicle". But even from it, only excerpts have survived, retold, for example, by Eusebius and Josephus Flavius. The code of ancient Egyptian laws has not been found either. We know the past of Egypt mainly from the inscriptions carved on the walls of tombs or temples. As a parting word to future historians, one should say: “The pyramids do not burn!”, Whenever it would not be more sad than funny.
A contemporary of Augustus, Titus Livy, wrote a monumental history of Rome in 142 books. He told in it about all the events that took place "from the founding of the city" right up to his modern era - up to 9 BC. However, we are familiar with only a third of this historical epic: thirty-five books (753-293 and 218-168 BC).
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Much of what happened during the period of the rapid expansion of the Roman Republic, when one war of conquest was replaced by another, as well as the entire era of civil wars - all this turned out to be beyond the framework of the book we know. We are condescending to Titus Livy, a lover of funny stories "from the antiquities of Rome", and we forget that he took up the work with a completely different purpose. He decided to show how the Roman people lost their valor and nearly died in bloody, fratricidal strife.
His work could serve as a lesson to many other peoples, who squandered the heritage of their ancestors in vain civil strife, but it was these books - the books of a merciless judgment over the past - that were lost over time. Titus Livy showed his contemporaries "the spectacle of the evils that our century has seen for so many years." Contrary to his intention, we read the popular story left from his denunciations.
Alas, ironically, Titus Livy was unwittingly involved in the disappearance of a whole body of writings on the history of Ancient Rome. His books met with such an enthusiastic reception among the Roman public that previous works on the same topic simply stopped reading and rewriting. Time has preserved for us only a few fragments from the works written by several generations of annalists - Roman historians of the III-I centuries BC.
Their names are known: Quintus Fabius Pictor, Aulus Postumius Albinus, Gnei Gellius, Valerius Anziatus and others, but their works are unknown to us. The original "Annals" by Fenestella (52 BC - 19 AD), which described primarily the life of the Roman Republic, were also lost.
Time did not spare the Emperor Augustus himself. During his lifetime, he was revered as a god. Immediately after the death of this "exalted" (Latin "augustus") ruler, one of the months of the year was named after him. Later, all of his works were lost, and in fact he was engaged in literary works from a young age.
As Suetonius writes, "he wrote many prose works of various kinds." Among them - "Objections to Brutus about Cato" - a pamphlet directed against the assassin of Caesar - and "On his life", an autobiography in thirty books, brought to 26 BC.
The writings of the unlucky opponent of Augustus - the orator Cicero, executed with his consent - have come down to us, one might say, in abundance. What does it mean? Apart from several treatises and many letters, 58 speeches written by him have survived. They are considered exemplars of rhetoric. Another 48 of his speeches are lost - just like the speeches of his predecessors, such talented orators as Gaius Julius Caesar, about whom one of the descendants said: "If he had more time for eloquence, he is the only Romans who could compete with Cicero." …
Among the extinct ancient works were also many political treatises: for example, "The State", one of the first anarchist utopias in the history of mankind, composed by the famous cynic Diogenes of Sinop. His dialogues and dramas are lost. We involuntarily associate the name of this philosopher only with anecdotes: “life in a barrel”, “Alexander obscuring the sun”, “a lantern with which you will not find a single worthy person in a crowded city on a white day…” All the rest disappeared in the darkness of history.
“How much we could learn, what wealth we would have, how much time and energy we would have saved if only our ancestors were more circumspect and tried to convey to us the knowledge accumulated by them, and the works they created,” laments the German writer Wolf Schneider. "Or if we had a list of everything that humanity has ever learned and discovered, a list of all its achievements and tragedies."
THE CONNECTION OF TIMES WAS FAILED …
The above is especially true for science. This is where the continuity of generations is important! How many scientists have spent all their strength, all their lives, to rediscover what was once known to their ancestors, but later lost in the ruins of burned down libraries! The history of science is full of "marking time" or false hobbies, which are caused by forgotten knowledge.
When books are lost or forgotten - memorial signs, following which the student comes to the teacher - then the connection of times disintegrates. The unconquered past repeats itself over and over again, until the students nevertheless repeat the discovery made long ago by their unknown teacher, which they never found. Unsettled on the right path by not a single parchment and not a single papyrus, they remained in the dark.
How many wise books have been lost by people! The lists of scientific works cited by Diogenes Laertius in his book On the Life, Teachings and Sayings of Famous Philosophers are surprisingly extensive; all the more sad to think that most of these works have long been lost. Only scraps of ancient philosophy have come down to us, and it remains only to reverently recall those medieval theologians, whose zeal quite fully preserved the works of Aristotle and Plato.
The decline begins with the first century of Greek philosophy - with the "seven wise men" (Thales, Solon and others), of which only a few aphorisms (gnomes) remained: "Know thyself", "Observe the measure", "Bad people make up the majority."
The astronomer, mathematician and traveler Thales, who considered water to be the "beginning of everything" (how close his conclusion is to the modern picture of the origin of life on our planet!), According to the same Diogenes Laertius, wrote two books "On the Solstice" and "On the Equinox", but both they have not reached us.
“Dozens, if not hundreds, of ancient philosophers are known to us only by their names, others are known only by the title of their works, others have survived in the form of an insignificant number of later statements about them, for the fourth one can draw a significant number of later statements about them, but, of course, no amount of separate and scattered fragments can replace whole treatises. - wrote the Russian philosopher A. F. Losev. - Sometimes we are forced to study entire centuries or entire large philosophical trends without possessing integral treatises. There are hundreds of these lost integral treatises of ancient philosophers."
Lost and work related to other areas of science. The Roman writer Pliny said about the astronomer Hipparchus that he “left the heavens as a legacy to his descendants,” but almost nothing remained of his manuscript heritage except for the minor work “Commentaries on Aratus and Eudoxus”. Pliny himself lost books about contemporary history of Rome and about the war with the Germans.
The Greek mathematician Diophantus, who lived in the 3rd century AD, was the first to introduce alphabetic symbolism into algebra. Almost one and a half thousand years later, in the XVI-XVII centuries, his works gave an important impetus to the development of alphabetic algebra in the works of European mathematicians of modern times (in particular, F. Vieta).
On the pages of his "Arithmetic" Diophantus investigated the solutions of linear and quadratic equations with one or several unknowns. However, this basic work of the Alexandrian scholar has not been completely preserved. Hundreds of tasks were lost. I had to start all over again.
Author: A. Volkov, from the book "Mysteries of Ancient Times"