Awhile back, I was ragging on masterpieces and god-like genius. Now when I teach philosophy, for example, it goes in the usual sequence: you know, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, etc. I think in some ways, despite their excellence, these figures are arbitrarily promoted, and I think when you start trying to dig in their eras, you find roughly comparable and largely forgotten figures (of course, people get revived etc too). Consider just in relation to the ancients: if we had the full texts of Heraclitus, or Parmenides, or Zeno (the founder of stoicism), we'd have completely different sense of the origin of philosophy and people's place within it. Well, much later texts can be lost too: never translated, never reprinted, for one reason or another inaccessible. "Classic" is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and once you have centuries of interpretation, of work on the issues opened by a particular figure and the manner in which he opened it, you're just not in a position to re-think the whole thing; you're operating within a context of decades or centuries of determinate texts and figures. Freddy might have been as plausible a candidate for godhead as Gautama or Jesus, but now you're not going to be able to know that, or see relgion except through the lenses you have. Promotion to classic status is largely arbitrary, but after a century or twenty, it is no longer optional. Indeed, looking at the original text through the haze of centuries that unfold from it, depend on it, it's going to look utterly fundamental. Classic is of course not something is when it's made, but something that it becomes: not inevitable in any case, but inexorable by the time you arrive.