Lost Works

Lost Works

A lost work is a document or literary work produced some time in the past of which no surviving copies are known to exist. Surviving copies of old or ancient works are called extant. Works may be lost to history either through the destruction of the original manuscript, or through the non-survival of any copies of the work. Deliberate destruction of works may be termed literary crime or literary vandalism. In some cases fragments may survive, either found by archaeology, or sometimes reused as bookbinding materials, or because they are quoted in other works. The discovery in 1822 of large parts of Cicero's De re publica was one of the first major recoveries of an ancient text from a palimpsest, while the most famous recent example is the discovery of the Archimedes palimpsest (hidden in a much later prayer book). Most missing works are described by works or compilations that survive, such as the Naturalis Historia of Pliny the Elder or the De Architectura by Vitruvius. Sometimes authors destroyed their own works. Other times they instructed others to destroy the work after their deaths; such action was not taken in several well-known cases, such as Virgil's Aeneid saved by Augustus, and Kafka's novels saved by Max Brod. Many works were apparently lost when the Library of Alexandria burned down in the Roman period, or perhaps later. Before the era of printing, manuscripts were handwritten, and so few copies existed, explaining why so much has been lost.

Works that no others referred to, of course, remain unknown and totally forgotten. The term most commonly applies to works from the classical world, although it is increasingly used in relation to more modern works.