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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   21614 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 9, 2023

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Here is an interesting an article about the library and what its contents may be. An excerpt:

It’s unlikely the Herculaneum villa’s library only contained this stuff. It’s all too narrow and niche in subject, and by all accounts the ancient elite were proud of amassing diverse collections in their libraries, and embarrassed not to have succeeded ... What we have appears to merely be a couple of shelves of volumes, maybe just one bookcase, all from the same spot, probably swept directly into the crates we found them in and staged in the courtyard to await a wagon to haul them.

There would have been a great deal else. Literature, history, science. Epistolaries, miscellanies, essays. Memoirs, novels, biographies. Satires. The work of orators and poets. Philosophy and mathematics. Scientific studies and technical manuals. Dictionaries and encyclopedias; and more ...

...

Consider the sole exception to the subject-theme of the books we recovered from the courtyard staging area: a lost history of Seneca the Elder (the then-famous father of the now-famous Seneca). Sadly, we can’t fully reconstruct it due to extensive damage. But it would have been nice to get it all, because that history ran up to the end of the reign of Tiberius, making it a text (heretofore entirely lost) recording Roman history during the very time when Jesus is supposed to have lived, which was written by a contemporary to those events. Since it began its narrative during the civil war of Julius Caesar, it only covered a single-century span of events, which could mean it was quite detailed. Could it have discussed Judean affairs in any important way? What about other things, unrelated to Christianity?

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