David Atkins:

There are those who will mock me for caring more about dusty old books and statues than about real people. Fine. But generations come and go. People live, die and are largely forgotten. History is forever. All of humanity is the same species, and our species has survived literally countless wars, ethnic cleansings, incursions and imperial aggressions. But once an irreplaceable artifact of history is gone, it’s gone forever. Thanks largely to a similarly barbaric cleansing on history on the part of early Christians, the world has lost 107 of Livy’s 142 books of Roman history, as well as Aristotle’s On Comedy–both losses of enormous consequence. These are crucial pieces of the human experience we will never recover.

-- http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2013/01/crimes-against-history-are-crimes.html