List of known lost Greek works

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hellenist
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List of known lost Greek works

Post by hellenist »

I am just wondering if anybody is aware of a reasonably comprehensive catalogue of known lost Greek works, e.g. when it comes to the extant texts and fragments there are corpora like that of the TLG, Diorisis, Author/Works listings from lexica etc, but when it comes to a collection of lost works where only the titles and/or authors are known, is there anything similar?

In terms of bibliography, I have been able to find 'The Lost Plays of Greek Tragedy' (v1 and v2) which does a good job of covering the area around tragedy, but is there something more expansive, or at least anything similar to the aforementioned works but dealing with a different area of Greek literature, either in bibliography or as an online resource? Wikipedia does seem to attempt such a list in the 'Lost literary work' article, although regrettably the contents of that section of the article are completely unsourced and feel too impromptu.
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paveln
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Re: List of known lost Greek works

Post by paveln »

Here's an interesting list of lost works:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_lite ... ical_world

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hellenist
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Re: List of known lost Greek works

Post by hellenist »

Thank you, I had already mentioned the article in my original post, but re-reading that article I guess it's better than nothing.
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NolanusTrismegistus
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Re: List of known lost Greek works

Post by NolanusTrismegistus »

The Lost Plays of Greek Tragedy looks fascinating, will check it out!

Have you had any developments on this since your first post?

I've always wondered whether the general state of apathy towards the Byzantine period has hindered our ability to recover more classical texts and insights about lost works. This apathy persists despite the fact that a significant portion of Greek original manuscripts date from this period -- including texts considered foundational to world literature, like Homer (Venetus A and B). I even imagine there are probably some translations or sections of these lost texts in Armenian, Georgian, Coptic, or Syriac, or hidden in a palmaist, sitting in some monestary or library basement somewhere, going completely undiscovered because just so few people study these langauges.

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