I often consider how today, many little-known books from the 1800s or early 1900s can be found in secondhand shops, discarded and decaying with yellow pages. Nobody cares about most of them and many get thrown out or lost, because they're not worth anything.

Yet books only survive from one period of time to a distant future by somehow having people decide not to discard them when they're worthless, until so much time has passed that they become historically rare and valuable and people begin to care for them and reprint their contents.

I can scarcely imagine how a text from 2300 years ago has survived to today. Do we have any records of the lineage of how ancient Greek texts made it to the present day? Who kept a copy, who transcribed it, who kept it safe in times of war and over centuries of changing culture?