page 112, in conclusion to the chapter "The library as a shadow"
"The Loves of Achilles is one of the lost plays of Sophocles, the copies must be missing one after ' another, century after century, destroyed in looting or fires or excluded from library catalogs, perhaps because the librarians believed that work of little interest or literary merit. A few words, however, was miraculously preserved. 'In the Middle Ages, in Macedonia', Tom Stoppard does tell one of his characters in the play The Invention of Love , 'the last flickering light of classical antiquity, a man he copied passages from old books to his young son, who was named the seventh, and so there is came from a phrase Loves of Achilles. Love, Sophocles said, it seems ice hand-held by the children '. I hope that the dreams of those who destroy books are plagued by this weak evidence of their ability to survive. "
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