I’m reading Michael Grant’s translation of Livy from 1960 at the same time as Mary Beard’s SPQR of 2016. Grant says unequivocally in his intro “a man can know it” of the classical literature - ie any specialist can easily read through all the existing texts. Beard in her conclusion says exactly the opposite - “no one has read it all”.
I’ve tried to find a list online of the extant Greek and Roman literature (rather than inscriptions etc) without luck. Of course there are the Loeb Library and Penguin Classics but to my knowledge these do not aim at being completist.
My question is whether there is a compressive list of known surviving classical literary works?Also can anyone explain the discrepancy between my authors?
The difference comes from how they treat the scope of 'literature'. How much of ancient Greco-Roman literature is 'literary'? I don't know exactly how Grant and Beard would answer that, but it's obvious their answers would be different.
A very minimalist view of 'literature', which counted (a) poetry, and (b) prose that is clearly intended as fiction for entertainment (like novels, Lucian's works, Dictys, and so on), would result in a modest corpus that anyone could read, as Grant says. You'd be looking at a few dozen authors. It might take months of persistent reading, but you could do it.
But Grant's own text, Livy, isn't fiction for entertainment. So the definition already needs to be expanded. Grant would probably include standard historical, philosophical, and rhetorical writers -- Cicero, Thucydides, Cassius Dio, Aristotle, and so on. That multiplies our minimalist corpus by a factor of ten or more. Still doable, but you'd have to really apply yourself over a period of multiple years.
But if we're including Aristotle, do we include Galen too? How about other scientific writers -- Ptolemy, Euclid, Cornutus? How about Pliny? There are hundreds more. What about rhetoricians? You can't treat someone like Dio Chrysostom as non-literary, so he should certainly be included. Should Quintilian? What about the church fathers? Roman agrimensores? metricians? mathematicians?
This is where the corpus inflates beyond human capability. There are thousands of classical authors that aren't usually mentioned in connection with a literary canon. When you take Classical World 101 you'll encounter Pliny and Plutarch, but you probably won't meet Herodian and Cornutus.
The fullest list of Greek-language authors and texts is the TLG Canon, which lists around 12,000 entries; to access it you'll need to make a free account. It doesn't provide full access to the texts (unless you are at an institution that has paid for access). For Latin-language works, there's the Bibliotheca Latina IntraText, which looks fairly complete but I can't vouch for how thorough it is.