knowledge in the pre-modern era was inherently sketchy all around. the christians burned some libraries; so did the muslims. and, people forget that the muslims only kept what they translated - and then burned the originals. there's lots that they didn't bother with because it was heretical...

but, one of the places that we lost a lot of books was actually in pompeii. i didn't know this until relatively recently, but one of the things that was lost under the soot was an important library. they've found it, too, but they can't open it.

so, i'll lace into religious ignorance with a lot of zeal, but in a sense it's almost a kind of a sport. what's closer to the truth is that the the world's a dangerous place for a book. and, we have hints that this happens periodically, too. most of euclid was probably ultimately sumerian in origin, not greek; the only remnant we have of this is a story about pythagoras inheriting wisdom from the magis and sages of the east, not unlike jesus, another mostly mythological story with a lost history that likely traces very deeply into antiquity. we have these greek names that we can attach to what survives: plato, archimedes, hesiod. we don't even have the names of the egyptians and the sumerians that came before them.

but, with all of these fragments, we have all of these questions of ownership, and we came up with these labels: pseudo-aristotle, pseudo-aristophanes. even the roman period is blurry, actually. i point this out repeatedly in many contexts: there are segments of byzantine history that we know were erased. like, we know that there was a period from year x to year y that was removed from history. and, they were thorough. they were the empire. the egyptians used to erase pharoahs altogether, apparently because they thought it would prevent them from coming back....

so, there are important historical texts in the late roman period of questionable authorship.

my fundamental theorem of poeticity claims that all history becomes poetry, so we can expect this to not just happen again but to happen forever. if we can burn books, we can delete data, too. these books didn't burn themselves; it wasn't an accident, or at least not mostly. it was actually something very similar to what we today call "cancel culture". the mullahs were deleting porphyry's account...

pun intended.

so, will they find a schubert symphony one day and, lacking context of where it came from, be forced to call the author pseudo-beethoven?

as stated: this is not a terrible addition to the list.