#the only plausible book that was destroyed by any concerted effort was porphyry's against the christians

[sabakos]

Also I know it's dumb to get mad at people on the internet, but I hate the persistent myth that the medieval Byzantines somehow intentionally destroyed the canonical works of the classical poets and philosophers who came before them, because it was obscene or non-Christian or whatever. This sends me into a near-blind rage not only because it is not remotely true, but because all evidence implies that the Byzantines tried so hard to preserve as much of it as the possibly could; everything that survives, all of the anthologies and epitomes and collections of extracts imply a deep and concerted attempt to do so, even as they were running out of the resources for it. They saved what they could, even as it became more expensive to do so and the pressures to spend that diminishing wealth elsewhere mounted as the empire declined.

And they barely got any recognition for it! They got the thanks for preserving the common intellectual heritage of both the West and medieval Islam by having their city ransacked and burned by the both of them, destroying an unknown amount of works whose titles can only be approximated by reading the likes of Photius (9th century) or Michael Psellos (11th century), an exercise in madness as you slowly realize what almost survived. And to top it all off, after the fall of Constantinople, the Renaissance philosophers and historians in the West immediately started inventing baseless tales of how the lost works of Sappho or Aeschylus must have been burned on purpose by overzealous Byzantines obsessed with purging heresy, in order to deny their own countries' shared responsibility for the bulk of the loss.

#the only plausible book that was destroyed by any concerted effort was porphyry's against the christians