Tragic

 The lost Trojan epics are but a tiny fraction of the lost works of Greek antiquity. To take Greek historians as an example, only the writings of Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Polybius have survived, along with a few Greek-language histories of Rome by Diodorus Siculus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Josephus, Appianus, Dio Cassius, and Zosimus - ten historians in all. But an authoritative survey counts 856 other Greek historians and chroniclers of which nothing survives save fragments embedded in other works.

- Edward N. Luttwak, "The Lost Homerics" in The New Criterion January 2024