Mary Beard holds that the amount of first-hand, written information we have from Rome, from 100 BCE onwards, is enormous. I never realised that we had so much contemporary data from Rome.
In addition to the question in the title, how can we be sure that the Roman written elements reproductions we have access to today are faithful to the originals? Moreover, do we actually have access, today, to original, non-stone based Roman written documents?
Mary Beard wrote that, in the case of literature, philosophy, etc, much of this got to our hands today thanks to Medieval monks and Islamic scholars. That I can understand - but what about the private letters and even shopping lists she mentioned in SPQR - a History of Ancient Rome?
Thanks
Edit:
Bonus question - all this data, some of it relating to seriously mundane matters, kind of implies a relatively literate society: how literate was ancient Rome (the city, at least)?
There were occasional periods where Classical Roman history was essentially an elite fad and this encouraged the preservation of major texts. During the Germanic invasions of the fifth century, for example, Gaul's elite took a very bookish interest in writing from classical Rome and produced a LOT of writings of their own (a handful of large volumes of letters, tons of saints' lives, some homilies, etc.) which all tried to ape Cicero, Virgil, and Sallust. One letter reveals a feud between two men which started because one accused the other of lengthening the wrong syllable in a Virgil quotation given during a speech (Avitus Ep. 57).
About 300 years later, in part to strengthen their claim as the heirs of a new Roman empire, the Carolingians supported the copying and discovery of classical maunscripts. The Fourth Crusade brought on another fad as refugees and prisoners from Constantinople came to Rome.
As to what was copied and why, that really depended on local monasteries. Christian materials were all valued. Cicero and other orators were copied because they were considered good examples for homilies. Letter collections were copied because being able to write a good letter was good. Items on local interest were copied.
Much of the letters Beard talks about survived by chance. The peet bogs of Vindolanda preserved the correspondences of soldiers on Hadrian's Wall. The desert of Egypt has preserved a trove of documents in Oxyrhynchus. There are a few records preserved from a businessman in Pompeii that are from wax tablets that were cut so deep the writing was scratched into the wooden back (Romans used wax tablets in everyday writing because they were easy to reuse, think like a mini blackboard).
On Gaul, see Shanzer and Wood. 2002. Avitus of Vienne: Letters and Selected Prose. Mathisen. 1993. Roman Aristocrats in Barbarian Gaul.
On Vindolanda, you can see the letters here: http://vto2.classics.ox.ac.uk/
On Pompeii, I would read Beard's book: Pompeii
how can we be sure that the Roman written elements reproductions we have access to today are faithful to the originals?
We can’t. Or rather, we can to a degree. There are variant readings of most classical texts based on different manuscripts that have survived the copying process. think of it as a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox, only done by hand. Scholars have devoted entire careers to working out and arguing over what is the most faithful copy of an original.
Textual transmission Latin classics - Monasteries for the most part. A good copy of an ancient text can be ignored for centuries as the monks get on with their normal duties. Some of the more elegant texts, written on vellum, proved a resource for religious writing- that is to say, the vellum was the resource. Scribes would scrape off the useless pagan text and use the refurbished sheep skin to write religious commentary. Fortunately, the scraping was not always 100% and we can sometimes determined what was written underneath. The texts are call palimpsests. And the ancient texts were not always anathema in the dark ages. (If you want to look further, check out Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics , ed Leighton Reynolds)
Then there are the trash heaps of Egypt. Think of all the paper thrown out these days. It was the same back then. Old papyrus shopping lists and personal letters and business contracts, useless for wrapping fish was discarded, and in the dry conditions of the desert they remained more or less intact (or nibbled by rodents) until someone came along and dug them up. That’s another serious discipline. The most fruitful source was from the town of Oxyrhynchus, today's el-Bahnasa, where British archaeologists John Granville Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt found the so-called Oxyrhynchus Papyri at the end of the 19th century and early 20th. Much has been published, much remains to be worked on.
Indeed, not only have not all been translated, many, given the state of the materials and the widely varying quality of penmenship, have not even been transliterated. Technology is helping here. The Ancient Lives project at Oxford allows amateurs to try their hand at the ongoing attempt to make sense of them all.
Another course are mummy cartonnage, basically papyrus strips used to make a base for funerary portraits (e.g. the Fayum mummy portraits). The papyrus used has all sorts of treasures, but how to get at them? Lately the firm of R.B. Toth, which does work on palimpsests, has been working with scholars at Duke University to peer beneath the gesso and paint to see what they can come up with. (You have a problem with mummy masks in that the art historians understandably want to preserve the front whereas the papyrologists want what lies beneath.)
Even in Herculaneum, hot blasted by Vesuvius, there are wax tablets that were carbonized but have remained intact and give us a collection of legal documents known as the case of Petronia Iusta, an ongoing law case that hinged on a young woman’s status as either a slave or free born.
As a follow up question, is the original premise even accurate? Has anyone quantified, for example in number of pages, how much original Roman writing had survived? Would it be millions of pages?