Philologists have reasoned from fragmentary evidence for 200 years. LLMs still confabulate when context is missing.

Overview

Of everything Thales supposedly wrote, not one authenticated word survives. Anaximander wrote the first prose treatise in the Greek tradition. Today it exists as roughly one sentence, preserved only because Aristotle quoted it and Simplicius, almost a thousand years later, copied that quotation. Heraclitus comes down in scattered aphorisms, most of them embedded in sermons of church fathers who quoted him to refute him. And yet classical philology built a rigorous discipline on top of this wreck

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