What? We don’t have the documents to the 382 Council of Rome nor Hippo 393? Where did they go? Why were they not preserved?
We have references to these councils in other documents, rather than the full texts of the Councils themselves. This is not unusual. There are whole texts, including aesthetic works by great poets and philosophical works by early Church Fathers, which only survive to us as quotations in the works of others. We hope that the quotations are accurate. In 1 Corinthians 5:9, Paul refers to an earlier letter which he had written to them, a letter which is not mentioned in the canon lists of the second century, presumably indicating that it had already disappeared by that stage.
The problem was that these things were written down on perishable, and often scarce, materials. Books were often destroyed by fires, whether accidentally, in a world which used fire as a light-source, or on purpose, during the sacking of captured cities. Because materials were so scarce, many texts were scraped off the page, which was essentially a piece of leather, and another one which was more important to the scribe was written over the top of it.
When the Roman Empire was shattered by the Goth invasions, the number of houses of learning plunged, and the incidence of violence soared. We lost a lot of knowledge in that period, so much so that, when the Franks went to West Asia in the Crusades, they rediscovered much which they had lost but which the Arabs had preserved. Thank God for the Muslims!
In other words, these texts were (probably) not lost as a result of indolence, but rather as the unfortunate consequence of one thousand seven hundred years of intervening history.
