Are There More Surviving Ancient Writings in Greek or Latin? - Tales of Times Forgotten

Most people are aware that the vast majority of everything that was written in ancient times has been lost. Some languages, however, have more surviving works than others. To give a somewhat extreme example, the Roman writer Pliny the Elder (lived c. 23 – 79 CE) records in his Natural History 18.5.22 that the city of Carthage contained libraries of scrolls written in the Punic language. In 146 BCE, however, the Romans utterly destroyed Carthage. They burned the entire city to the ground and killed or enslaved every single person who lived there.

The Romans dispersed whatever survived of the contents of the Carthaginian libraries among the various kings of North Africa—except, Pliny tells us, for a treatise on agriculture written in a set of twenty-eight scrolls by the Carthaginian writer Mago, which the Senate ordered be translated into Latin. The Latin translation of Mago’s treatise was later lost and is only known today from references in Greek and Roman sources. The Punic language itself went extinct sometime around the fifth century CE. As a result, not a single literary work that was originally written in the Punic language has survived to the present day complete; even the works that are known are known only in name, summary, or fragmentary quotation.

Ancient texts written in the Greek and Latin languages have been relatively fortunate in terms of their survival. Scholars often estimate off-the-cuff that around 1% of the known works written in Greek and Latin in ancient times has survived to the present day. This may not seem like a lot, but it is still far more writing than any individual can possibly hope to read, even in a lifetime, and it is a great deal more than what has survived in Punic. Given these circumstances, it is only natural that many people are curious which of these two languages has more surviving ancient texts: Greek or Latin? The answer, for reasons I will explain shortly, is almost unquestionably Greek.

Much more surviving Greek than Latin literature

There is an easy, if imperfect, visual demonstration of how much more ancient literature has survived in Greek than in Latin. The Loeb Classical Library is a series of books published by Harvard University Press that includes most canonical works of “classical” Greek and Latin literature. According to this article from Books and Designers published in 2013, at that time, the series included 520 volumes, but a few more have probably been added since then.

Each volume of the series takes the form of a facing-page translation. On the left-hand page is the Greek or Latin text of the work that is contained within the volume. On the right-hand page is a fairly literal translation of the text into English prose. Volumes primarily containing texts originally written in Greek have green covers and volumes primarily containing texts originally written in Latin have red covers.

Virtually any university library worth its salt will have a complete set of the Loeb Classical Library somewhere in its collection. For instance, the Herman B. Wells Library at Indiana University Bloomington has a complete set in the Reference Room on the ground floor. If you find a complete set somewhere, you will immediately notice that there are nearly twice as many volumes with green covers as there are volumes with red covers.

Admittedly, the Loeb Classical Library does have some significant omissions. Notably, its coverage of the Christian church fathers is very incomplete, since the series arbitrarily includes some of the major church fathers, but not others.

In these cases, however, the series actually tends to favor inclusion of Latin authors over Greek. The series notably includes works by the Latin-language Christian authors Tertullianus, Marcus Minucius Felix, and Augustine of Hippo, but does not include any works by the equally significant Greek-language Christian authors Ioustinos Martys, Eirenaios of Lugdunum, Origenes of Alexandria, Athanasios of Alexandria, or Ioannes Chrysostomos.

ABOVE: Photograph I took myself of the complete set of the Loeb Classical Library in the Reference Room in the Herman B. Wells Library at Indiana University Bloomington. (A few volumes are missing here and there because they have been removed and they haven’t been reshelved.)

Much earlier beginning of writing in Greek than in Latin

There are a number of factors that have contributed to there being more surviving ancient texts written in Greek than in Latin. The first factor is that the Greeks began writing in Greek long before the Romans began writing in Latin and people who know the Greek language have continued writing in forms of it continuously until the present day.

To explain, I suppose it makes sense to go back to the beginning. Sometime around 1600 BCE or thereabouts, the Mycenaean civilization arose in mainland Greece. The Mycenaeans spoke an archaic form of the Greek language known as Mycenaean Greek and they wrote a number of documents in this form of Greek on clay tablets in a syllabary writing system known as Linear B. These are the very oldest documents written in the Greek language that have survived to the present day.

Unfortunately, the only people who seem to have known how to write in Linear B were a relatively small number of elite specialist scribes who worked in Mycenaean palaces. All the surviving texts in Linear B are administrative documents written by these scribes. Sometime around 1200 BCE or thereabouts, the Mycenaean palace system that supported the scribes collapsed. As a result, people no longer worked as scribes and the Linear B writing system was totally forgotten.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a clay tablet with writing on it in Linear B, recovered from the archive of the Mycenaean city of Pylos

For about four hundred years after the Mycenaean collapse, there are absolutely no surviving texts written in the Greek language. Then, in around the eighth century BCE, the Greeks adopted a form of the Phoenician alphabet, which they adapted to suit their own language. This became the Greek alphabet.

The oldest surviving inscription written in the Greek language using the Greek alphabet may be the Dipylon inscription, a short inscription scrawled on an oinochoë, or wine vessel, that was discovered in the Dipylon Cemetery in Athens. This inscription is thought to date to sometime around 740 BCE or thereabouts.

The oldest surviving works of literature in the Greek language that have survived to the present day are the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the poems of Hesiodos of Askre. These poems were most likely originally composed for oral performance in either the late eighth century BCE or the early seventh century BCE, relying on older oral poetic traditions.

Archilochos of Paros (lived c. 680 – c. 645 BCE) is probably the earliest Greek lyric poet who has any writing that has survived to the present day. Sadly, his work survives only in fragments. (I previously used him as an example in this article I wrote in May 2021 to illustrate how very early Greek literature was sometimes shockingly obscene.)

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Dipylon inscription, dating to c. 740 BCE

The oldest surviving writing of any kind in the Latin language is the inscription on the Praeneste fibula, which most likely dates to the seventh century BCE. The inscription in extremely archaic Latin reads:

“MANIOS MED FHEFHAKED NVMASIOI.”

This means, in English:

“Manios made me for Numerios.”

Thus, the earliest writing of any kind in Latin dates to roughly a thousand years after the earliest writing of any kind in Greek and maybe around a hundred years after the earliest writing in Greek using the Greek alphabet. Moreover, by the time of the oldest known menial inscription in Latin, many noteworthy works of Greek poetry that have survived in writing had probably already been composed, including the Iliad, the Odyssey, the poems of Hesiodos, and probably the poems of Archilochos. At this point, though, no one was writing literature in Latin.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Praeneste fibula, which bears the oldest surviving inscription in the Latin language, dating to the seventh century BCE

The early flowering of Greek literature

The fifth and fourth centuries BCE are traditionally considered to have been the golden age of classical Greek literature. These centuries produced the tragic playwrights Aischylos, Sophokles, and Euripides, the comic playwrights Aristophanes and Menandros, the historians Herodotos, Thoukydides, and Xenophon, the philosophers Plato, Aristotle, and Theophrastos, the orators Lysias, Demosthenes, Aischines, and Isokrates, the medical writers of the Hippokratic Corpus, and literally hundreds of other authors, some of whose writings have survived to the present day.

King Alexandros III of Makedonia (ruled 336 – 323 BCE)—or, as he is better known in English today, “Alexander the Great”—conquered the entire Achaemenid Empire, including diverse lands spanning from Greece to northwest India. After Alexandros’s death in 323 BCE, his empire fragmented into a number of kingdoms, which were heavily influenced by Greek culture and ruled by various Greek monarchs. This marks the beginning of a historical era that is known as the “Hellenistic Period.”

During this period, Greek became the dominant language and lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean. Many authors who were not Greeks themselves wrote works of literature in the Greek language. For instance, the Egyptian writer Manethon (fl. c. late fourth or early third century BCE) and the Babylonian writer Berossos (fl. c. early third century BCE) both wrote works in the Greek language about the histories of their respective peoples. Portions of both these histories have survived.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Hellenistic-style portrait head of an unknown priest of the Greco-Egyptian god Serapis dating to between c. 230 and c. 240 CE, now held in the Altes Museum in Berlin

The earliest literature in Latin

It is only after all this that Romans and people in the Roman cultural sphere began to produce the earliest known literature in the Latin language. The earliest person who known to have written poetry in the Latin language is Livius Andronicus (lived c. 284 – c. 205 BCE). Only fragments of Livius’s works have survived to the present day, but historical sources record that he primarily wrote plays that were based on earlier Greek plays.

The earliest Roman author who has any works that have survived to the present day complete is the comic playwright Titus Maccius Plautus (lived c. 254 – c. 184 BCE), who wrote twenty comedies that have substantially survived to the present day, as well as many other comedies that have either been completely lost or survived only in small fragments.

Thus, by the time anyone even started writing literature in the Latin language, the Greek language already had a vast and varied literary corpus, which included (among other many things) epic poetry, lyric poetry, tragedy, comedy, history, philosophy, political theory, oratory, and medical texts.

ABOVE: Image from this website of a woodcut made by the workshop of Michel Wolgemut in 1493 showing how he imagined the Roman comic playwright Plautus might have looked (No one knows what he really looked like.)

Greek literature written simultaneous with Latin literature

Greek literature had a roughly four-hundred-year head start over Latin, but people did not stop producing literature in the Greek language after people started producing literature in the Latin language.

Indeed, some of the most prominent authors who wrote in the Greek language lived during the time when Greece was ruled by the Roman Empire. These include the historians Diodoros Sikeliotes (lived c. 90 – c. 30 BCE), Dionysios of Halikarnassos (lived c. 60 – c. 7 BCE), Arrianos of Nikomedeia (lived c. 86 – c. 160 CE), the biographer and Middle Platonist philosopher Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c. 46 – after c. 119 CE), the orator Ailios Aristeides (lived 117 – 181 CE), and the Syrian satirist Loukianos of Samosata (lived c. 125 – after c. 180 CE).

As I previously mentioned in this article I wrote in September 2019 about what language the Romans spoke, even some Romans who spoke Latin as their first language chose to write their literary works in Greek because Greek held greater literary and philosophical prestige than Latin. Most famously, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (lived 121 – 180 CE) was born in the city of Rome and spoke Latin as his first and native language, but yet he wrote his philosophical notes, which are best known today by the title Meditations, in Koine Greek.

Less famously, Klaudios Ailianos (lived c. 175 – c. 235 CE) was a Roman orator who was born in Praeneste, the very city in the heart of Latium from which the Praeneste fibula takes its name. Like Marcus Aurelius, he almost certainly spoke Latin as his first language, but yet he chose to write exclusively in Atticized Greek. His surviving works are Variegated History and On the Nature of Animals.

As a result of this, it is only natural that people in ancient times produced significantly more literature in the Greek language than in the Latin language.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius in the Musei Capitolini in Rome

Better rate of preservation for Greek texts in the manuscript tradition

In addition to the fact that ancient people produced more Greek literature than Latin literature in the first place, a greater percentage of the Greek literature that was produced seems to have survived to the present day. This is largely due to the differing locales in which ancient Greek and Roman texts were copied throughout the Middle Ages, which I discuss in greater depth in this article I wrote in January 2020, citing Anthony Kaldellis’s book Byzantium Unbound, which was published in 2019 by ARC Humanities Press.

Most of the works of ancient literature written in Greek that have survived to the present day have survived because they were copied throughout the Middle Ages by scribes for the sake of educated people in the Byzantine Roman Empire who could read Greek.

Meanwhile, most of the works of ancient literature written in Latin that have survived to the present day have survived because they were copied throughout the Middle Ages by scribes for educated people in western Europe (i.e., “Latin Christendom”) who could read Latin. In both cases, many (but not all) of these scribes were monks and many (but not all) of these educated people were clergy of some variety.

For most of its history, the Byzantine Roman Empire had a highly centralized government and a thriving class of educated urban elites who were primarily, but not exclusively, centered in the city of Constantinople. Western Europe had educated elites too, but the Byzantine Roman Empire, in general, had more institutional and organizational support for the copying and studying of classical texts.

ABOVE: Byzantine Roman manuscript illustration dating to the mid-tenth century CE depicting Matthew the Apostle with scribal equipment of that era

We can see the gap in preservation between Greek and Latin literature perhaps most clearly in the genre of history. Herodotos and Thoukydides are generally considered to have been the most influential early figures in the development of the Greek historiographical tradition.

All the works that Herodotos and Thoukydides are known to have written have survived to the present day in more-or-less the state of completion in which they seem to have left them. (Thoukydides does not seem to have ever finished writing his Histories of the Peloponnesian War, since the work ends mid-sentence in the middle of the war and multiple ancient historians, including Xenophon, wrote continuations of it, picking up from exactly where Thoukydides left off.)

By contrast, the most influential early figures in the development of the Roman historiographical tradition were Quintus Fabius Pictor (fl. c. 215 – c. 200 BCE) and Lucius Cincius Alimentus (fl. c. 200 BCE). Only a few fragments of their writings have survived to the present day.

In fact, most of the histories of Rome written in Latin that are known to have existed in ancient times have been entirely or almost entirely lost. Meanwhile, many works about Roman history written in Greek have survived to the present day in at least substantial portions, including Polybios of Megalopolis’s Histories, Dionysios of Halikarnassos’s Roman Antiquities, Kassios Dion’s Roman History, Herodianos of Antioch’s History of the Empire from the Death of Marcus, and Zosimos of Constantinople’s New History.

These works have survived to extent that they have primarily because the Byzantine Romans were interested in reading about Roman history in Greek and therefore copied them. Thus, for significant portions of Roman history, we are ironically primarily reliant on histories written in Greek, rather than histories written in Latin.

ABOVE: Detail from Wikimedia Commons of a scene from the Stele of Kleitor dating to the second century BCE, depicting the historian Polybios of Megalopolis, whose Histories, written in Greek, is the main surviving source for most of the Middle Roman Republic

Papyri

The third major reason why there are more surviving ancient writings in Greek than Latin is because papyrus fragments account for a very large share of the ancient texts that have survived to the present day. There are at least half a million surviving papyrus fragments from the Hellenistic and Roman periods. These fragments include some literary texts, but consist primarily of other texts, including administrative documents, wills, letters, records of land ownership, marriage records, and even grocery lists. Only an extremely tiny fraction of these papyri have been pieced together, transcribed, and published.

As I discuss in this article I wrote in July 2019 about the Library of Alexandria and the survival of ancient texts, the climates of Greece and Italy are generally too temperate and wet for papyri to survive in those places, even in fragments. As a result, nearly all the surviving ancient papyri come from the extremely dry climate of Egypt.

Egypt is located in the eastern Mediterranean. As such, it was continuously a part of the predominantly Greek-speaking cultural sphere from the late fourth century BCE until the conquests of the early Islamic caliphates in the seventh century CE. Even the Romans in Egypt mostly wrote their administrative documents in Greek. As a result of this, although there are some surviving papyri written in Latin, there are vastly more surviving papyri written in Greek.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 3035, a papyrus fragment from the city of Oxyrhynchos in Egypt bearing an arrest warrant in Greek for a Christian man named Petosarapin dated by its final line to the exact day 28 February 256 CE

Conclusion

I should clarify that, for the purposes of this article, I am only talking about things written in ancient times, which we can say, by a very broad definition, might include everything written before roughly the seventh century CE. As I am sure many commenters will point out, people continued writing in both Greek and Latin long after the end of antiquity. On account of this, if you open up the parameters of the question to include everything written in Greek or Latin at any point in history, then it becomes much harder to tell which language has a larger surviving corpus.

Sadly, I am not in a position to assess whether there are more surviving ancient texts written in Greek versus other well-attested ancient languages, such as Egyptian, Akkadian, Sanskrit, Classical Chinese, and so forth, because I do not have a good impression of how many surviving texts there are in those other languages.