3. literary longevity

I feel like in the case of old Greeks like Euripides, one of the major factors for their work's success is the fact that there just weren't many publications back then, so each new one became well known relatively quickly. When they survived the dark ages, the fact that they were so old and survived for so long kept them as popular as ever. In the case of Jane Austen, one of the reasons her books have lasted is probably because she was a woman writer in a world of men writers, and her language was very clever and artful (though her stories were pretty lame). Other classics I think were very original in their style or content and with the help of some luck, got onto the classics train.
I think these days it would be very hard to create a classic. There's something like 3000 new publications every day, and the chance that one of those would be read and stick out from the rest is very small. Not to mention reading has become a much less popular pastime in this hectic world of television, movies, and video games. It seems the really popular books are like the Da Vinci Code that keeps people on the edge of their seats. Popular books these days need to be noticed and talked about until the media covers it and a movie is made about it and then it will survive, for a couple years anyway.
While it would be fun to be a household name as a famous author, with more books and less readers it just seems to me like it would be nearly impossible.