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DDickey

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This may be a little silly, but I thought I'd ask it anyway: If you could somehow magically get your hands on an ancient book that now no longer exists, which would you want to read? For my money, I'd love to read three things: Sulla's autobiography; Polybius' missing work on dictators; and Appian's missing history of Egypt.

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This may be a little silly, but I thought I'd ask it anyway: If you could somehow magically get your hands on an ancient book that now no longer exists, which would you want to read? For my money, I'd love to read three things: Sulla's autobiography; Polybius' missing work on dictators; and Appian's missing history of Egypt.

 

How do you narrow it down?

 

To Begin:

 

The missing sections of Ammianus Marcellinus;

 

Claudius' "History of the Etruscans";

 

Anything that was relatively detailed written during and about the 3rd century AD - to fill in the gaps in the 'crisis' - and especially on Claudius II Gothicus

 

There - that will do for a start ..... !! :(

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This compendium of lost books is on my wish list at Amazon. Thought I'd share it.

 

The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You'll Never Read (Hardcover)

by Stuart Kelly

 

 

From Publishers Weekly

Homer's first work, alluded to by Aristotle, was supposedly a comic epic poem. Byron's memoirs were posthumously destroyed, and Ben Jonson didn't live to complete his final play, a pastoral tragicomedy. Flaubert, who suffered seizures that were probably epileptic, kept the text of a scientifically accurate novel about insanity locked up inside his head. At 15, Scottish freelance critic Kelly began compiling a List of Lost Books when he was shocked to learn that there are no extant plays of Agathon, a celebrated fifth century B.C. tragedian and friend of Euripides. "From Shakespeare to Sylvia Plath, Homer to Hemingway, Dante to Ezra Pound, great writers had written works I could not possess," Kelly laments. "The entire history of literature was also the history of the loss of literature." At their best, Kelly's short essays whet the appetite for great works of literature, and serious readers will enjoy scanning these pages looking for curiosities and pondering lost volumes from the oeuvres of Austen, Chaucer and St. Paul. Inevitably, the thesis is more charming than the lengthy execution, and one suspects this would have been much more effective in condensed form as a whimsical article in Harper's or the Atlantic. Illus. (Apr. 25)

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This may be a little silly, but I thought I'd ask it anyway:
If you could somehow magically get your hands on an ancient book that now no longer exists..., or may never have:

 

The " secret memoirs" of Claudius destroyed by Nero and his mother Agripinna, before doing away with the old man, which might have gone a long way in giving him some "respect" from future Romanophiles. . . :(

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I wouldn't mind getting my hands on Caesar's Anti-Cato, It would be good to read in Caesars own words just how much he loathed Cato. I'm sure it would have been a witty and cutting verbal assault on one of his most ardent critics.

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I wouldn't mind getting my hands on Caesar's Anti-Cato, It would be good to read in Caesars own words just how much he loathed Cato. I'm sure it would have been a witty and cutting verbal assault on one of his most ardent critics.

 

That's a good one. I hadn't thought of it. Kudos.

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This compendium of lost books is on my wish list at Amazon. Thought I'd share it.

 

The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You'll Never Read (Hardcover)

by Stuart Kelly

 

 

From Publishers Weekly

Homer's first work, alluded to by Aristotle, was supposedly a comic epic poem. Byron's memoirs were posthumously destroyed, and Ben Jonson didn't live to complete his final play, a pastoral tragicomedy. Flaubert, who suffered seizures that were probably epileptic, kept the text of a scientifically accurate novel about insanity locked up inside his head. At 15, Scottish freelance critic Kelly began compiling a List of Lost Books when he was shocked to learn that there are no extant plays of Agathon, a celebrated fifth century B.C. tragedian and friend of Euripides. "From Shakespeare to Sylvia Plath, Homer to Hemingway, Dante to Ezra Pound, great writers had written works I could not possess," Kelly laments. "The entire history of literature was also the history of the loss of literature." At their best, Kelly's short essays whet the appetite for great works of literature, and serious readers will enjoy scanning these pages looking for curiosities and pondering lost volumes from the oeuvres of Austen, Chaucer and St. Paul. Inevitably, the thesis is more charming than the lengthy execution, and one suspects this would have been much more effective in condensed form as a whimsical article in Harper's or the Atlantic. Illus. (Apr. 25)

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Any document from Dacia in the common vernacular from about 150 CE to, well, the 16th century. I can't even describe how wonderful that would be for many of us researchers!

 

I'd also love to have access to tons of grammars...not just the Appendix Probi, which is a later document, but as many as possible from all over the Roman Era. As much documentation of common vernacular as possible.

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This compendium of lost books is on my wish list at Amazon. Thought I'd share it.

 

The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You'll Never Read (Hardcover)

by Stuart Kelly

 

 

From Publishers Weekly

Homer's first work, alluded to by Aristotle, was supposedly a comic epic poem. Byron's memoirs were posthumously destroyed, and Ben Jonson didn't live to complete his final play, a pastoral tragicomedy. Flaubert, who suffered seizures that were probably epileptic, kept the text of a scientifically accurate novel about insanity locked up inside his head. At 15, Scottish freelance critic Kelly began compiling a List of Lost Books when he was shocked to learn that there are no extant plays of Agathon, a celebrated fifth century B.C. tragedian and friend of Euripides. "From Shakespeare to Sylvia Plath, Homer to Hemingway, Dante to Ezra Pound, great writers had written works I could not possess," Kelly laments. "The entire history of literature was also the history of the loss of literature." At their best, Kelly's short essays whet the appetite for great works of literature, and serious readers will enjoy scanning these pages looking for curiosities and pondering lost volumes from the oeuvres of Austen, Chaucer and St. Paul. Inevitably, the thesis is more charming than the lengthy execution, and one suspects this would have been much more effective in condensed form as a whimsical article in Harper's or the Atlantic. Illus. (Apr. 25)

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  • 7 months later...
This may be a little silly, but I thought I'd ask it anyway: If you could somehow magically get your hands on an ancient book that now no longer exists, which would you want to read?

 

 

One of the great losses to our understanding of Ancient History was the first pair of Plutarch

Edited by guy
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