Needless to say, your average enthusiast can't do *anything* with that raw text, even if they've taken some Greek. Turning that into easily readable Greek text is the job of one kind of specialist (epigraphers) at which point other specialists get to translating and understanding it.
But no history book is going to just put the raw, unedited surviving text of the Gortyn Code into the main text of the book and expect the reader to do anything with it. Instead, you're going to get a translation into English.
Indeed it is - understandably! - quite rare to see untranslated Latin and Greek at any length in the core text of historical articles or books. Instead, we translate in the text and the original Latin/Greek usually goes in a footnote for the reader that wants to check the translation.
I’m working on translating a German text in Catholic theology from the 50s right now. ALL the quotes are in unglossed Latin, indicating the audience at the time was expected to just be able to read it. They’re making me find scholarly translations instead.
Catholic theologians? Certainly. But go back a little earlier and we'd be doing that just generally because Latin skills were almost as common as English skills today. It would, however, be normalized Latin with word breaks and no abbreviations - very unlike the original sources from antiquity.
Oh of course, I just thought it was a nice curiosity that the original audience was expected to read Latin, but the new audience is not (it’s a study of Augustine, and it deals with textual variants as well—a reminder that we don’t have originals)
The epigraphers and papyrologists and numismatists do the work everyone else relies on, and it's really quite difficult to train new ones. Preach.
I deeply admire and greatly fear all three sets. Especially numismatists. /How do they do the coin magic?/
Oh, so very much so. I took paleography and epigraphy coursework and still, honestly, I can only understand epigraphers and papyrologists as some kind of wizards. "Oh, this 13 character gap must be *these specific words*" 🙃 Even more so numismatics, where I didn't do a lot of coursework.
I once did a presentation for a Mystery Cults class on the sanctuary at Eleusis, and a particularly important article I read did so much with a tiny reference to Athens paying for bricks for the sanctuary. It was terrifying. (I guess archeologists kinda terrify me in general, in a good way.)
But numismatists are like another step beyond that. Especially once I learned how they could date specific coins by the different rates at which the top and bottom plates wore out when striking them. Dear god, it makes dendrochronology look straightforward and trivial. Numismatists! Terrifying!
Numismatics is dark wizardry.
"You see, this figure is holding a thrysus which means this coin is recalling the stylistic motif of this other coin two decades earlier, suggesting the moneyer had a connection to... Me: Wait, you can *see* what is in his hand?
And also that. I cannot make out /anything/ on coins. Like, there's a... figure? I guess? And maybe some letters? (And now I'm remembering a whole article that was clearly one stage in an extended academic slapfight over the expression of the infant about to be sacrificed in Carthaginian art.)
I'm really into an idea I got out of Mary Caruthers's Book of Memory that "the literature" includes the community who used it. I don't know if that resonates but i imagine it takes a huge amount of reading, related to reconstructing that community.