Among the writers who wrote in Homeric Greek or Attic/Atticised Greek before the Middle Ages, whose works survived better? Is Lucian the man? Should the topic be further narrowed down and specified, I am concerned especially with non-technical (e.g. non-scientific) writers, and concerned with number of words rather than number of “works”.
I would be grateful if someone would give or point me to information on the topic, for I do not know how I can make Library-Catalogues or Google answer. I am considering choosing a single author with whose works I can do extensive reading, and quantities matter. You’re welcome to advice otherwise too if I am making unwise assumptions here. Thank you.
If you’re really set on this course of action, I think you’d do better to choose an author or a genre you want to read more of. For sheer quantity, Galen can’t be beat, but there are many other more literary authors who wrote a lot. Plato would keep you busy for quite a while. So would Herodotus, and Euripides, and Thucydides, and Aristotle, to go no further forward in time. Nonnus’ epic is very long, but you wouldn’t want to read that before reading Homer (and maybe not even then).
But my advice would be to sample a wide variety of kinds of Greek before settling on a single one. You could for instance start with one work of Xenophon’s (relatively easy) or the first book of Herodotus (very readable) and branch out from there. You may find that even that is too ambitious.