Transmission and Legacy of the Classics

Nearly everything we possess of Greek and Roman literature survives thanks to an unbroken, but often precarious, chain of manual copying that stretched from antiquity through the Middle Ages, since virtually no original manuscripts survive and every ancient text we read today descends from a copy of a copy of a copy, often separated from its author by a thousand years or more. In the Latin West, monasteries played the decisive role in this transmission, particularly from the Carolingian period onward: the educational reforms promoted under Charlemagne in the late eighth and ninth centuries spurred a wave of manuscript copying at centers such as Tours, Corbie, and Fulda, during which scribes developed Carolingian minuscule, a clear, legible script and the ancestor of modern lowercase letters, that produced many of the oldest surviving manuscripts of Latin authors such as Livy, Cicero, and Virgil. As classicists L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson have documented in detail, the survival of any given ancient text was often a matter of extraordinary contingency, depending on whether a single surviving manuscript happened to be copied again before it was lost to fire, damp, or neglect, so that the classical corpus we now study represents only a fraction of what was originally written and once read.