Sometime in the 11^th century AD, in the monastery of Monte Cassino, 80 miles southeast of Rome, a monk carefully and diligently copied from an unknown original a manuscript of a Roman novel about a man who suffers from an excess of curiosity about the world of magic, thereby accidentally transforming himself into a donkey. This novel, originally titled Metamorphoses but better known as The Golden Ass by Apuleius, dates to the late second century AD and is the only Roman novel in Latin to survive in its entirety. Its most famous episode, the myth of Cupid and Psyche, has inspired countless retellings, including C.S. Lewis’s own novel Till We Have Faces. References to Apuleius’s novel exist in antiquity, as in a letter of Augustine, who clearly had read it and thought it an autobiographical account of its author’s travails. The novel’s charm proved irresistible for such Renaissance writers as Boccaccio and has continued to enthrall such more recent readers as the French novelist Gustave Flaubert. 

But the novel’s survival is, one could say, a miracle. This 11^th-century manuscript from Monte Cassino is the earliest surviving copy of the novel, and from it all later manuscripts were copied. Considering that the novel’s plot heavily features magic, mockery of Christianity, and bestiality (not to mention more “normal” sex scenes), it is a legitimate question to ask: why was this text not suppressed by Christians? And what did the monks who copied it think of it? We can only guess the answer to the second question, but we can answer the first: over the course of Late Antiquity and the European Middle Ages, a deliberate program of copying the pagan classics by monasteries across Europe assured the survival of many texts that would otherwise have been lost. Independently during the same period, the (likewise Christian) Byzantine Empire—a vestige of the Roman Empire that survived in ever-shrinking form until the Ottoman conquest in 1453—kept reading and copying ancient Greek literature, ensuring its survival.  

Except, no matter the facts, some find this difficult to accept. Recently on X, an anonymous account dubbed “the Hellenist” confidently wrote:  

“Because of Christians, mankind lost: • 90% of Greek tragedies • 100% of the Epic Cycle • 90% of Greek philosophy • 90% of Greek lyric poetry • 100% of Polykleitos’ Canon • 95% of Stoic/Epicurean texts Christianity is a plague. Hellenism is the cure.”  

This is a tired trope that just won’t die. The motive of the writer is clear: he expressly states it in the concluding two sentences of his post. But is Christianity really “a plague” on the survival of Greco-Roman classics? I am leaving aside the nonsensical statement that “Hellenism is the cure”—it is unclear what the author even means by it, except maybe to encourage the study of the Greeks, which is something I think everyone should do—in conjunction with (and for the benefit of) the Christian life. 

We indeed have lost massive swathes of Greek and Roman literature, but the story behind the disappearance of many books—and the preservation of some—is much more complicated than “the Hellenist” believes. Consider the example of Greek tragedy. In his book Libraries of the Mind, literary scholar William Marx traces this very question: why do some books survive and others disappear? How do we build our visible and invisible libraries? As it happens, people of all periods and places, including antiquity, have consistently privileged some books and eventually forgot others. Yes, many Greek tragedies have disappeared—Marx reliably calculates that we’ve lost 99% of Greek tragedy, not just the 90% “the Hellenist” notes in his screed.  

So who is to blame? The answer is: a lot of people. Already by the end of the fifth century BC, the heyday of Greek tragedy, a canon of sorts was narrowed down, encompassing just the three greats—Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—leaving out many others who had been writing and winning prizes in Athens during their lifetime. In his comedy Frogs, the Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes puts that sentiment into the mouth of Dionysus, god of wine and patron of drama, who is greatly upset over the death of Euripides. Yet there are other tragedians still writing and so, Dionysus is asked, why could he not just patronize another playwright? Dionysus responds firmly in the negative. Audiences, it seems, have always been a cruel and capricious lot, choosing their few favorites and discarding all else—not on purpose, mind you, but simply by ‘voting with their feet’ on which texts deserved the effort of retaining.  

And so, even of classical Greece’s three great tragedians, only a fraction of their works survives, as further attrition by selection bias continued over the course of the half-millennium that followed. By the second and third centuries AD, the list of tragedies that still survived and circulated was the same list we have today—not because of Christians, but because of ancient Greek readers’ preferences over the course of centuries. Maybe Hellenism isn’t the cure “the Hellenist” thinks it is, after all. 

The story of the Epic Cycle, which only survives in fragments quoted by later (some of them Christian) authors, is similar. Composed not long after the Homeric epics, epics like the Cypria (the story leading up to the Trojan War) and the Nostoi (the stories of heroes’ returns home after the war) simply did not achieve the popularity of the Iliad and Odyssey. In his Poetics, Aristotle who was familiar with the Cypria and the Nostoi—showing that at least some in the 4^th century BC still read them—is highly critical of these epics, considering them utterly subpar, at least in comparison with Homer’s great works. As for the survival of Aristotle’s own works, it was due to the high respect he had continued to attract throughout antiquity and into the Middle Ages—the great Christian 13^th-century theologian and philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas relied on Aristotle more than any other ancient writer. 

I could go on, but perhaps the point is now obvious. The reason much Greek and Roman literature that has been lost is not due to some kind of Christian conspiracy. Rather, the ravages of time have led to the discarding of many texts that just weren’t valued highly enough to be preserved, as with many contemporary books that will surely be forgotten within a generation, if not sooner. Not every book ever published becomes a timeless classic. And while some isolated Christians at various times were against reading the pagans (for instance, St. Jerome famously “quit” Cicero for a while), the vast majority continued to see the classics of pagan literature as indispensable for a good education. Such is the aim of the sixth-century AD Christian politician-turned-monastic Cassiodorus. In his Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning, Cassiodorus insists that the best education is one that combines Christian literature with the pagan Greco-Roman classics. 

By the time of Cassiodorus and for the entirety of the Middle Ages, the role of monastic scriptoria in copying the classics is well established. During the Carolingian renaissance of classical learning in the 8^th and 9^th centuries, we see an explosion in the copies of classical works—an estimated 100,000 new copies of manuscripts. And then there are monasteries like Monte Cassino, known as a center of learning and copying. Indeed, the same manuscript on which Apuleius’s novel survived is also home to our earliest surviving copy of Tacitus’s Histories and Annals—both incomplete, but that’s better than missing entirely. 

Like every classicist I know, I wish we had more Greek and Roman texts. But stories like that of the Apuleius and Tacitus manuscript from Monte Cassino remind me that if not for faithful Christian copyist monks, we would have a lot fewer.