Hello everyone, so recently I was looking into the history of some famous works written by people in Ancient Rome such as Caesar or Cicero, and found out that we no longer have the original full and final versions of these works written by these people in their own handwriting anymore. Instead we have copies of them that we use today. An example of this would the Commentarii de Bello Civili. The oldest version of this work written by Caesar that we could find is a thousand year old version found in Italian City Archives. Also around 16 passages of the text are known to be missing. So it made me wonder if there is any works by anyone in this era that have survived in their original forms today.
Thanks, Splat
Ancient examples of handwriting survive, certainly. We have graffiti on walls, thousands of papyri examples from Egypt, writing on bark "paper" from Vindolanda in Britain, et cetera. Some of those are even from known, named individuals. But we have no original writings from "famous" Romans. We do know that Cicero wrote his own letters, sometimes, but we gather that he usually dictated his writings to a slave, especially his secretary named Tiro. It was probably unusual for any elite Roman to write themselves (it was a laborious, messy, fiddly process to write with ink on papyrus with a quill), and the venue where they would have written themselves most often would have been letter correspondence. We have many letters of Cicero, some of which he clearly wrote himself (because he complains about it), but all of those come to us in manuscript form, copies of copies of copies, a thousand years after they were first composed. The "originals" are long gone.