Academic Exercise on the Abstinence of the Early Christians from Reading Profane Books

...tro Alcyonius, Paul Colomiès in his Cimelia Literaria, in these words:

“I heard as a boy from Demetrius Chalcondyles, a man most learned in Greek literature, that the Greek priests flourished with such authority among the Byzantine Emperors that, by their favor, they burned a great many poems of the ancient Greeks—especially those containing loves, shameful revels, and the wickednesses of lovers—and that thus the plays of Menander, Diphilus, Apollodorus, Philemon, and Alexis, and the songs of Sappho, Erinna, Anacreon, Mimnermus, Bion, Alcman, and Alcaeus perished; then, in their stead, the poems of our Nazianzen were substituted, etc.”

It is not our task to enumerate by what fate or accident so many monuments of either Greek or Latin poets, which are today found wanting, have perished. Perhaps it will not be foreign to our purpose to have indicated that the ancient monks, as the learned observe, were all too diligent in mutilating them. p)

p) See the annotations of Scheffer on Fable 12, Book IV of Phaedrus.