I understand you're talking about ethics. I'm talking about how we conceive of ethics as relates to artistic works which I see as tied to time and law.

Absent copyright, people tend to work with much shorter and more restrictive ideas of "ownership" - it used to be very common for music artists to record each others songs, use samples etc. Similar in painting, and other art forms. It wasnt theft, thats just how you did stuff. Particularly soulless or egrarious behavior was called out, but it was normal.

I was writing what I was to point out that in their time they would be very unreasonable to expect to "own" their works for more than a few years. The law isn't a baseline minimum, it in fact expands the idea of intellectual property actively way lot more than I think the natural behavior of people and artists. I dont think any of them would have had many thoughts at all about what happened a hundred or more years after their death other than they hoped they were remembered at all