i do think theres something sad about how largely only the literature that's considered especially good or important is intentionally preserved. i want to read stuff that ancient people thought sucked enormous balls
Time to take this post entirely too seriously:
- I often wonder if this is why you so commonly see the sentiment that we are in an era of uniquely bad literature, or at least that the fact that most books don't have artistic aspirations and are not aiming to be anything other than mindless entertainment is new. In fact what's new is the idea that everything is worth preserving (and also the internet making it easier to preserve it). The dumb artistically unambitious trash books of the past have survived only sporadically, because people thought of them as literally disposable.
- When I was in college I had a professor who was an expert on detective fiction. He had a longstanding beef with the idea that "Murders in the Rue Morgue" was the first detective story. He thought that it seemed way too polished to be inventing a new genre, and also that the whole orangutan business had the vibe of someone subverting preexisting audience expectations and maybe engaging in a bit of stealth parody. With the help of some student volunteers, he went trawling through old magazines and newspapers and found hundreds of detective stories from the early 1800s that just hadn't garnered enough individual attention to be remembered. This was because most of them sucked balls. He created an online archive of them, so you too can read these mostly terrible stories.
We actl DO have some idea what ancient audiences read! I'm not going to cite anything here because 1)this was never my specific field so I don't have anything specific in mind and 2)I don't feel like putting that amount of time into this reply, but we've found quite a bit of, essentially, courtroom dramas in North African trash dumps from the Roman era(they actl seem to have had a pretty big impact on Christian Martyr literature!). So: Romans probably would have been big fans of "Law and Order" XD XD
And then there's the "Romance Literature"(literally "Roman Like Literature") of middle and late medieval times(so like: Arthuriana), which has long been known to be inspired by Roman Adventure Fiction. Roman Adventures were bscl colonial fic, and our own pulp Adventure stories aren't TOO far off, from what I've heard: Good Roman Man ends up Stranded Amongst the Foreigners, Woos the Exotic Princess, Kills the Evil Stereotypes, and Makes a Fortune before Returning to Rome And his Upstanding Roman Wife. I've never actl READ a roman adventure, but I've heard/read the Sinbad stories are a good example of what this stuff was like.
Also: Heroic literature. Obvsl this includes The Illiad, The Odyssey, and the REAMS of knockoffs and expansions both had(very little of which survived down to us tho we know OF it from surviving commentaries), but it also includes a fairly unique genre of fic; Heroic Philosopher Stories. The archetype of this is Plato's Socratic writings, though it seems to have, in Roman hands, leaned more heavily on the Martyrdom aspect of Socrates's tale, and less on the philosophical discussion. Again: this seems to have had a big influence on early Christian martyr literature.