How Have Works of Greek Drama Survived?

It is widely known that the vast majority of all works of ancient drama have been lost forever. We have record of literally hundreds of playwrights who wrote plays in the Greek language in ancient times, but only five of these playwrights have any plays that have survived to the present day complete or nearly complete under their own names. Three of these playwrights were tragedians: Aischylos, Sophokles, and Euripides. The other two playwrights—Aristophanes, and Menandros—were both comedians. All five were Athenian citizen men who lived in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE.

Many people who do not have any degrees in classics have heard these authors’ names and maybe even read some of their plays in translation, but very few people who do not have degrees in classics know how and why any of these authors’ works have survived to the present day when so many other works of ancient Greek drama have been lost.

Why works have been lost

Before we talk about why some works of ancient Greek drama have survived, we should first talk about why so many works of Greek drama have been lost. Many people incorrectly believe that the reason why so many works of ancient literature have been lost is because a fire in 48 BCE destroyed the Great Library of Alexandria, which many people incorrectly believe contained all the knowledge of the ancient world. As I discuss in this article I wrote in July 2019, however, this is very much a misconception.

The Library of Alexandria was indeed a very large and very famous library, but its importance has, in general, been greatly exaggerated. Most cities in the Mediterranean world during the Hellenistic and Roman Eras had libraries, some of which had extremely large collections. In fact, the Library of Alexandria actually had a rival: the Library of Pergamon, which you rarely ever seem to hear about.

Wealthy people in the ancient world also often amassed very large private libraries, since scrolls were a highly prized commodity and owning a large number of them was a way to show that someone was wealthy and educated. In fact, ostentatious book-collecting was so widespread among wealthy elites that the Syrian satirist Loukianos of Samosata (lived c. 125 – after c. 180 CE) wrote a satirical letter in the Greek language titled Remarks Addressed to an Illiterate Book-Fancier, making fun of people who collected large numbers of books only to never actually read them.

Therefore, as much as people love to talk about the notorious fire of Alexandria in 48 BCE, this fire, at the very most, destroyed only one famous collection of scrolls. The only works that might have been lost in that particular fire are works that were not held in any other libraries or private collections anywhere else in the entire Mediterranean world. These works must have been a relatively small portion of the library’s total collection and they were probably going to be lost anyway since they evidently weren’t being widely copied.

It is also unclear exactly how much of the Great Library’s collection the famous fire in 48 BCE actually destroyed. The Greek historian Kassios Dion (lived c. 155 – c. 235 CE) gives a description of the famous fire of 48 BCE in his Roman History XLII.38.2 that seems to suggest that it only destroyed a portion of the library’s collection housed in a warehouse near the docks—not the entire library itself. There is also substantial evidence to indicate the continued existence of some form of large library in Alexandria well into at least the first century CE.

ABOVE: Nineteenth-century fictional illustration by the German artist O. Van Corven depicting how he imagined the Library of Alexandria might have looked in its heyday

The real reason why so many works of ancient literature have been lost is not because one library burned, but rather because, in the ancient world, there was no printing press and the only way to produce a new copy of a work of literature was to copy the whole work out by hand, which was an extremely time-consuming, laborious, and often expensive task.

As a result of the law of entropy, over time, all manuscripts are naturally and inevitably destroyed through decay, insects, water damage, accidental fires, and all kinds of other natural forces. Some manuscripts manage to survive longer than others, but they will all inevitably meet some form of destruction in the end. Once a manuscript is destroyed or damaged to the point of illegibility, if no other copies of the works contained in that manuscript manage to survive, those works will be lost forever. This means that, if a work was not copied, it was usually quickly lost.

As I discuss in this article I wrote in January 2020, the vast majority of works of ancient Greek literature that have survived to the present day have survived because they were copied throughout the Middle Ages by scribes living in the Byzantine Roman Empire who were literate in Greek. As a result of this, the works of ancient Greek drama that have survived are mainly ones that appealed to the Byzantine Romans’ literary tastes.

This information will become important soon enough. In the meantime, let’s move on to talk about the playwrights whose works have survived.

ABOVE: Mid-tenth century Byzantine manuscript illustration of Matthew the Apostle with Byzantine-era scribal equipment

Aischylos

Aischylos (lived c. 525 – c. 456 BCE) is the earliest of the three ancient Athenian tragic playwrights for whom any plays have survived to the present day complete under their own names. There were between seventy-eight and ninety different plays attributed to him in antiquity.

In late antiquity, a scholar or copyist compiled an edition of seven tragedies attributed to Aischylos that they considered to be his most exemplary works. The works in this edition were copied throughout the Middle Ages, mostly by scribes living in the Byzantine Roman Empire who were literate in Greek. Meanwhile, the other works attributed to Aischylos that were not included in the “select edition” were eventually lost.

As a result, the seven tragedies included in the “select edition” are the only plays attributed to Aischylos that have survived to the present day complete. These seven plays are as follows:

• The Persians (originally performed 472 BCE)
• Seven Against Thebes (originally performed 467 BCE)
• The Suppliants (originally performed 463 BCE)
• Agamemnon (originally performed 458 BCE)
• The Libation Bearers (originally performed 458 BCE)
• The Eumenides (originally performed 458 BCE)
• Prometheus Bound (date unknown, authorship disputed)

Of these seven plays, the first six are universally agreed to have actually been written by Aischylos, but the seventh, Prometheus Bound, is of disputed authorship.

Prometheus Bound differs drastically from the six undisputed plays in both its style and its content. For instance, one crucial difference that many scholars have struggled to come to terms with is the play’s portrayal of the god Zeus. The plays that are universally agreed to have been written by Aischylos all portray Zeus in a positive manner, but Prometheus Bound seemingly portrays him as a cruel, unjust, and capricious tyrant.

The renowned classical philologist M. L. West argues in his book Studies in Aeschylus, published by B. G. Teubner in 1990, that Prometheus Bound may have actually been written by Aischylos’s son Euphorion, who is also known to have been a very successful and admired playwright.

In addition to the seven complete plays attributed to Aischylos, a large number of fragmentary passages from plays that have been lost have also survived. Most of these passages are preserved through quotation in surviving works by authors who had access to plays that have since been lost. For instance, as I discuss in my article about Achilles and Patroklos from October 2020, there are a couple surviving fragments from Aischylos’s tragedy The Myrmidons in which Achilles alludes to himself partaking in intercrural sex with Patroklos.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble bust dating to around 30 BCE on display in the Naples National Archaeological Museum, intended to represent the ancient Athenian tragic playwright Aischylos, based on an earlier Greek bust dating to the fourth century BCE

Sophokles

Of the three ancient Athenian tragic playwrights who have complete surviving works under their own names, Sophokles (lived c. 497 – 405 BCE) seems to have been the most prolific; there were at least 120 different plays attributed to him in antiquity.

As was the case with Aischylos, at some point in late antiquity, a scholar or copyist compiled a collection of seven tragedies written by Sophokles that they considered to be his most exemplary works. The plays that were included in this “select edition” were copied throughout the Middle Ages and have therefore survived to the present day. Meanwhile, all Sophokles’s other plays were lost. The seven plays of Sophokles that have survived to the present day complete are:

• Aias (originally performed sometime between c. 450 and c. 430 BCE)
• Antigone (originally performed c. 441 BCE)
• The Women of Trachis (originally performed sometime between c. 450 and c. 425 BCE)
• Oidipous Tyrannos (originally performed c. 429 BCE)
• Elektra (originally performed sometime between c. 420 and c. 414 BCE)
• Philoktetes (originally performed 409 BCE)
• Oidipous at Kolonos (originally performed 401 BCE, several years after Sophokles’s death, produced by his son)

Modern scholars agree that Sophokles actually wrote all of the complete plays that are attributed to him.

In addition to the seven complete plays that have been passed down to us through the medieval manuscript tradition, a large number of fragmentary sections and passages from Sophokles’s other plays have also survived. Again, most of these passages have survived through quotation in extant works written by ancient authors who had access to plays that have since been lost, but some of them come from papyrus fragments discovered in Egypt.

Most famously, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the English archaeologists Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt excavated hundreds of thousands of pieces of papyri from the garbage dump of the city of Oxyrhynchos in Egypt, dating from the Hellenistic and Roman Eras.

During their excavations, Grenfell and Hunt discovered a fragmentary scroll dating to the second century CE containing over four hundred lines of a previously almost entirely lost satyr play written by Sophokles, titled Ichneutai or Searchers. Hunt published the text of this scroll in 1912 in The Oxyrhynchus Papyri: Part IX. Sophokles’s Ichneutai and Euripides’s Kyklops are the only satyr plays that have survived to the present day in substantial portions.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an ancient Roman bust on display in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptothek, intended to represent the ancient Athenian comic playwright Sophokles, based on an earlier Greek bust dating to the fourth century BCE

Euripides

Euripides (lived c. 480 – c. 406 BCE) is the ancient Athenian playwright with the greatest number of plays that have survived to the present day complete. There were at least ninety-five different plays attributed to him in antiquity. Of those, nineteen have survived to the present day complete or nearly complete.

Of those nineteen plays, however, modern scholars generally agree that Euripides most likely only wrote eighteen. Most scholars think that the tragedy Rhesos was written by a different playwright and mistakenly attributed to Euripides at a significantly later date, since it differs so drastically from Euripides’s other plays in terms of both style and content.

Ten of the surviving plays attributed to Euripides have survived because, at some point in late antiquity, a scholar or copyist selected them for an edition of what they considered to be Euripides’s most exemplary plays. The plays that survive from this “select edition” are the ones that are generally the most widely read, studied, and performed today. The works from the “select edition” are:

• Alkestis (originally performed 438 BCE)
• Medeia (originally performed 431 BCE)
• Hippolytos (originally performed 428 BCE)
• Andromache (originally performed sometime between c. 428 and c. 425 BCE)
• Hekabe (originally performed c. 424 BCE)
• The Trojan Women (originally performed 415 BCE)
• The Phoinikian Women (originally performed sometime between c. 410 and c. 408 BCE)
• Orestes (originally performed 408 BCE)
• The Bacchae (originally performed 405 BCE, shortly after Euripides’s death)
• Rhesos (unknown date, probably written by an unknown playwright other than Euripides and mistakenly attributed to him at a later date)

The other nine complete plays attributed to Euripides have survived purely through random chance. You see, at some point during late antiquity or the Middle Ages, there was a complete, multi-volume set of all Euripides’s plays, arranged in alphabetical order by title. For some reason, one volume of this set, containing nine plays with titles starting with the Greek letters epsilon through kappa, got separated from the rest of the collection. The plays contained in this single volume got copied. Meanwhile, somehow or another, the rest of the collection was lost.

The nine plays of Euripides that have survived through the volume from the alphabetical collection are:

• The Children of Herakles (originally performed c. 430 BCE)
• The Suppliants (originally performed c. 423 BCE)
• Elektra (originally performed c. 420 BCE)
• Herakles (originally performed c. 416 BCE)
• Iphigeneia among the Taurians (originally performed sometime between c. 414 and c. 412 BCE)
• Ion (originally performed sometime between c. 414 and c. 412 BCE)
• Helene (originally performed 412 BCE)
• Iphigeneia at Aulis (originally performed 405 BCE, shortly after Euripides’s death)
• Kyklops (satyr play, unknown date)

Some of the surviving plays of Euripides that are considered “complete” have problems or omissions. Notably, The Bacchae seems to have a random section about the length of a full page front and back that is simply missing from the middle of the text—almost as though a page fell out of a manuscript at some point and was lost.

Meanwhile, the text of Iphigeneia at Aulis has been wildly corrupted by later interpolators. In fact, Euripides’s original ending for the play seems to have been lost entirely and the ending that is preserved in the manuscripts seems to have been written by a later scribe or imitator, since the ancient writer Klaudios Ailianos (lived c. 175 – c. 235 CE) references and quotes from an entirely different ending for the play from the one that is found in our manuscripts in his On the Nature of Animals 7.39.

In addition to the nineteen complete plays attributed to Euripides, there are also a number of fragments from other plays. Most of these fragments have survived through quotation by other authors. For instance, as I discuss in my article about the evidence for atheism in ancient Greece from September 2019, the writer Pseudo-Ioustinos quotes in his On Monarchy 5.6 a speech from Euripides’s lost tragedy Bellerophontes in which a character (probably, although not certainly, Bellerophontes himself) declares that deities do not exist and points out the problem of evil.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble bust on display in the Museo Pio-Clementino in the Vatican Museums, intended to represent the ancient Athenian tragic playwright Euripides, based on an earlier Greek bust dating to the fourth century BCE

Aristophanes

Aristophanes (lived c. 446 – c. 386 BCE) was a significantly younger contemporary of Sophokles and Euripides who outlived both of them. He is the earliest ancient Athenian comic playwright for whom any plays have survived to the present day complete. There were at least forty different plays attributed to him in antiquity, all of them comedies.

In late antiquity, a scholar or copyist compiled a collection of eleven of Aristophanes’s plays that they considered to be his most exemplary works. The comedies included in this “select edition” were copied throughout the Middle Ages, again mostly by scribes living in the Byzantine Roman Empire who were literate in Greek. Meanwhile, all Aristophanes’s other plays were eventually lost. The eleven plays of Aristophanes that have survived to the present day complete are:

• The Acharnians (originally performed 425 BCE)
• The Knights (originally performed 424 BCE)
• The Clouds (originally performed 423 BCE, but survives only in a substantially revised version made at some point between c. 419 and c. 416 BCE that was probably never performed during Aristophanes’s lifetime)
• The Wasps (originally performed 422 BCE)
• Peace (originally performed 421 BCE)
• The Birds (originally performed 414 BCE)
• Lysistrata (originally performed 411 BCE)
• The Women at the Thesmophoria Festival (originally performed c. 411 BCE)
• The Frogs (originally performed 405 BCE)
• The Assemblywomen (originally performed c. 391 BCE)
• Wealth (originally performed 408 BCE, but survives only in a substantially revised version that was performed in 388 BCE)

As you may have already guessed, in addition to the eleven complete plays, a large number of fragmentary passages from Aristophanes’s lost plays have survived. Most of these fragments have been preserved through quotation by other authors in surviving works.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble herma dating to the first century CE on display in Uffizi Gallery in Florence, intended to represent the ancient Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes, based on an earlier Greek bust dating to the fourth century BCE

Menandros

Menandros (lived c. 342 – c. 290 BCE) was an ancient Athenian comic playwright who, having been born nearly a century after Aristophanes, lived in a very different historical and literary environment from the earlier playwrights whom I have discussed so far. As I discuss in this article I wrote about Greek drama in April 2019, Menandros wrote in a very different genre of comedy from Aristophanes. Aristophanes wrote in a genre known as “Old Comedy,” which included lots of political satire, slapstick, crude sex and body humor, and absurd elements.

Menandros, by contrast, wrote in a genre known as “New Comedy,” which developed out of Old Comedy over the course of the fourth century BCE. New Comedy generally tended to avoid politics, slapstick, ribaldry, and absurdity. Instead, New Comedy relied heavily on stock characters and situational humor. If we allow modern comparisons, we might say that Old Comedy was similar to Saturday Night Live or Monty Python, while New Comedy was more similar to a sitcom.

One hundred and eight comedies are known to have been attributed to Menandros in antiquity. As it happens, his comedies were actually more popular than those of Aristophanes during both the Hellenistic Era and the classical Roman Empire. This situation, however, changed abruptly in late antiquity. The Byzantine Romans of the Middle Ages greatly preferred the Old Comedy of Aristophanes over the New Comedy of Menandros. As a result of this, none of Menandros’s comedies have been passed down through the medieval manuscript tradition complete.

Nonetheless, as a result of Menandros’s extraordinary popularity in antiquity, his works are heavily overrepresented among the Hellenistic and Roman papyri that have been discovered in Egypt. Menandros’s most complete surviving play is Dyskolos (i.e., The Grouchy Old Man), which is nearly complete. Two other plays—Samia (i.e., The Girl from Samos) and Epitrepontes (i.e., The Men at Arbitration)—have mostly survived, but are missing some portions. Four other comedies written by Menandros have survived in very large portions. These are:

• Aspis (i.e., The Shield)
• Perikeiromene (i.e., The Girl with the Cropped Hair)
• Misoumenos (i.e., The Man who Is Hated)
• Sikyonioi (i.e., The Sikyonians)

Menandros used a large number of proverbs and witty expressions in his plays that were frequently quoted by later Greek and Roman authors. As a result, there are many fragments from his lost comedies that have been preserved through quotation.

Additionally, Menandros was so dearly beloved by the ancient Romans that a number of Latin-language adaptations of his comedies by the Roman playwrights Titus Maccius Plautus (lived c. 254 – c. 184 BCE) and Publius Teretius Afer (lived c. 185 – c. 159? BCE) have survived to the present day as well.

Modern scholars of ancient Greek literature generally tend to agree with the Byzantine Romans in evaluating the Old Comedy of Aristophanes more highly than the New Comedy of Menandros. Nonetheless, Menandros had an influence on Roman comedy and literature in general that is nearly impossible to overstate. Roman comedy, in turn, was extremely influential on later western European comedy. As a result, most western European comedy throughout history has been much more heavily influenced by the work of Menandros than by the work of Aristophanes.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble bust on display in the Museo Chiaramonti in the Vatican Museums, intended to represent the ancient Athenian comic playwright Menandros, based on an earlier Greek bust dating to the fourth century BCE

Not to mention the various plays by other authors that have survived incomplete…

In total, there are six or seven ancient Greek playwrights who have works that have survived to the present day complete or nearly complete:

• Aischylos
• Whoever wrote Prometheus Bound if it was not Aischylos
• Sophokles
• Euripides
• Whoever wrote Rhesos (since it probably wasn’t Euripides)
• Aristophanes
• Menandros

This list, however, can, in some ways, be misleading, since it makes no mention of the many fascinating playwrights who wrote plays in the Greek language that have survived to the present day incomplete.

Interestingly, not all of these authors who wrote plays in the Greek language were ethnically Greek themselves. There was actually a Jewish playwright named Ezekiel the Tragedian who lived in the city of Alexandria in around the third century BCE. He wrote a retelling of the story of the Exodus in the Greek language in the form of a Greek tragedy, with Moses as the protagonist. God himself even has a speaking role!

Roughly 269 lines of Ezekiel’s tragedy, mostly forming continuous passages, have survived to the present day, preserved through quotation by various early Christian authors. Altogether, these lines are believed to comprise somewhere between one fifth and one fourth of the whole play. The scholar Howard Jacobson published an edition of the tragedy through Cambridge University Press in 1983, including all the surviving Greek text along with a full English translation and lots of commentary.

ABOVE: Image of the front cover of Howard Jacobson’s edition of Ezekiel the Tragedian’s Exogoge, a retelling of the story of the Exodus in the form of a Greek tragedy from the third century BCE