Survival ends where the syllabus ends

Claim (verbatim)

The three great multi-book historians who survive in bulk - Polybius (40 books), Diodorus Siculus (40), Cassius Dio (80) - survive with the same wound geometry: a contiguous run of books in continuous transmission, then a cliff, beyond which there is nothing but the excerpt-and-epitome channel. Polybius: books 1-5 whole in the direct tradition, 6-18 through the excerpta antiqua, the remainder substantially via the Constantinian Excerpta. Diodorus: books 1-5 and 11-20 whole; the other twenty books are fragments, largely Constantinian and Photian. Dio: a continuous core around books 36-60 in the direct tradition, with the early and late decades surviving through Xiphilinus' eleventh-century epitome, Zonaras, and the Excerpta. This is not random leaf-loss, which would pepper gaps through every decade; it is demand geometry. Byzantine readers and teachers used the famous stretches - the Punic-War pentad, Diodorus' mythological and Persian-War books, Dio on the fall of the Republic and the first emperors - and copying tracked use book by book within a single work. The set book, not the author, was the unit of survival; one book past the last assigned stretch, even the greatest history thins instantly to palace confetti. The pattern is countable from the transmission registers of the critical editions, with Pinakes supplying the witness geometry of the surviving blocks.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: for each of Polybius' Histories, Diodorus' Bibliotheke and Cassius Dio's Roman History, the books with continuous direct-tradition transmission form at most two contiguous blocks totalling at most half the original book count, and at least 90% of the books outside those blocks survive, where they survive at all, only through the excerpt-epitome channel (Constantinian Excerpta, excerpta antiqua, Xiphilinus, Zonaras) (primary clause: the three-way conjunction of block structure and the >=90% channel-exclusivity; the verdict follows it); disambiguation: a book counts as continuously transmitted if a medieval codex carries its running text; papyri and modern-find fragments are excluded; coverage guard: book-level status per Buettner-Wobst's Polybius, the Teubner and Bude Diodorus, and Boissevain's Dio - void if any register proves impossible to partition.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the transmission registers of the standard critical editions joined to Pinakes witnesses per work - a book-by-book carrier classification with a block-contiguity test.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The carrier map is printed in the registers the Kill itself names: Polybius 1-5 direct with the excerpta antiqua to book 18 and the Constantinian channel beyond (Moore), Diodorus 1-5 and 11-20 direct with the remainder excerpt-and-epitome, Dio's books 36-60 core flanked by Xiphilinus, Zonaras and the Excerpta (Boissevain's preface); Brunt states the block-and-channel geometry as the general fact of the big historians' survival. The conjunction re-derives printed transmission registers. One pin flaw for registration: the channel enumeration omits Photios, who carries Diodorus' later books (cod. 244), and a literal reading of the 90% clause could snag on him.

• J.M. Moore, The Manuscript Tradition of Polybius (Cambridge, 1965)
• U.Ph. Boissevain (ed.), Cassii Dionis Cocceiani Historiarum Romanarum quae supersunt, vol. I (Berlin, 1895), praefatio
• P.A. Brunt, 'On Historical Fragments and Epitomes', Classical Quarterly 30 (1980)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.