I’m reading Philosophy in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds and it’s obvious that most of what we know about early philosophers comes not from their words directly, but from what others wrote about them. Sometimes hundreds of years later. The further back, the worse it is, and there can be are no surviving works, only a name.
To be fair, the same problem continues today. In 2008, master recordings from some of the greatest and important musical artists of all time burned in a warehouse fire.1
When Time travel is invented I’ll happily travel back to collect the original copies of philosophical works. Yes, it may create paradoxes, but perhaps one of the lost works has already solved them.
Footnotes
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The Day the Music Burned, The New York Times. ↩