Euripides’ Lost Plays

Surprises aren’t something you normally associate with the study of ancient Greek drama. Yet in September 2024 scholars meeting at the University of Colorado Boulder were treated to just that. Two academics based at the university presented what they believe to be portions of two lost plays by Euripides, Ino and Polyidus.

The discovery was made in November 2022 when Basem Gehad, an archaeologist based in Egypt, sent the classicist Yvona Trnka-Amrhein a photograph of a papyrus that had recently been uncovered at the ancient village of Philadelphia, 100km southwest of Cairo. It wasn’t all that big – barely 10.5 square inches, all told. But Trnka-Amrhein quickly saw that it was special. By comparing the papyrus against a database of Greek texts, she realised that she was looking at previously unknown texts by Euripides. She needed confirmation, though – so called on her mentor, John Gilbert, a specialist in Euripidean fragments, for help. Together, they concluded that, while 20 of the 98 lines on the papyrus were already known, the remaining 78 hadn’t been seen for almost 2,000 years.

As Trnka-Amrhein has put it, this is ‘kind of a big deal’. Euripides was one of the three ‘big names’ in Greek tragedy, alongside Sophocles and Aeschylus. Granted, he wasn’t the most successful. Born in c.480 BC, he probably came from a modest family, and had a brooding, introspective character, bordering almost on the misanthropic. This did little to endear him to the Athenian public, and over his 50-year career in theatre he won the Dionysia – the annual festival at which chosen tragedies competed for prizes – only five times, including once posthumously. But prizes aren’t everything. He was extremely prolific. We don’t know how many plays he produced with any certainty. Some ancient authorities say 92, others 75. His importance is hard to overstate, though. His plays are remarkable for their variety, the inventiveness of their construction and their (often hectic) surprises. Thanks to Seneca’s adaptation of his works for Roman audiences, he had a decisive influence on Renaissance drama – and has enjoyed a fresh surge of popularity since the Second World War.

Fragments and tales

Unfortunately, most of Euripides’ work has not come down to us. Only 17 complete tragedies and one satyr play have survived. Another intact play, the Rhesus, has been wrongly attributed to him. Assuming that he wrote around 90 plays, this means that more than 80 per cent of his oeuvre has been lost.

Well, not ‘lost’ entirely. Of the ‘lost’ plays, some 49 survive in fragmentary form. Some appear as quotations in texts by other classical authors. Some excerpts were occasionally reproduced in ancient anthologies, educational texts or the like. And some scraps of originally complete copies survive in papyrus or (more rarely) parchment.

Somewhat surprisingly, more of Euripides’ plays have survived than either Sophocles’ or Aeschylus’ – and vastly more than the dozens of ‘lesser’ dramatists. As Christopher Collard has noted, we have 1,220 text fragments from Euripides’ plays, compared to 1,140 from 107 known works by Sophocles (seven complete), and just 520 from 73 known plays by Aeschylus (seven complete). This is all the more striking given that some of the Euripidean fragments are pretty lengthy.

Fragments, of course, are not the same as a complete play. But even if many of Euripides’ plays are mostly – or entirely – lost, we still know quite a bit about some of them. In the third century BC, Aristophanes of Byzantium recorded the names of Euripides’ plays, together with the dates they were first performed in Athens. Around 200 years later a compilation now known as Tales from Euripides provided plot summaries for around 25 of his works. Understandably, these are light on detail; but they give us a decent idea of what some of the fragmentary plays might have looked like. One of the most intriguing upshots of this is how ‘untragic’ some of Euripides’ tragedies were. Take Andromeda. First performed in 412 bc, it was Alexander the Great’s favourite play. He was reputed to be able to recite great chunks of it from memory. Its sweetness may have been part of its appeal. After Perseus rescues Andromeda from the sea monster, the two fall in love, get married and live happily ever after.

Get lost

Still, this isn’t a huge amount to go on. A plot summary is no substitute for the real thing. So why do the fragmentary plays matter? For a long time, many scholars didn’t think they did. In 1939 H.D.F. Kitto’s Greek Tragedy – still used as an undergraduate textbook – didn’t even mention them. It was generally assumed that the 18 complete plays that survived did so because they were the best. Anything else simply wasn’t worth bothering with.

But it turns out that this isn’t really the case. Euripides’ plays survived because they were copied and recopied down the centuries. There are any number of reasons why this chain of textual reproduction might have been broken. Papyrus and parchment may be robust materials, but they are still vulnerable. It doesn’t take much for a manuscript to be burned or misplaced. Over a long enough timescale, it only takes one copy to be destroyed for an entire play – or a whole clutch of plays – to be eradicated forever. And tastes change. In Byzantine theatres, by far the most popular classical plays were Euripides’ Orestes, Phoenician Women and Hecuba – none of which would be likely to pack out the West End today. Plays that don’t reflect what audiences expect simply get forgotten.

In fact, many of the complete plays that have come down to us today have only survived by chance. Whereas ten plays – including the pseudo-Euripidean Rhesus – were transmitted in several manuscript traditions, nine others (the so-called ‘alphabetic’ plays) are known thanks only to a single volume of a collected edition, containing titles beginning with epsilon, iota and kappa. What we have is a random selection: not the best at all.

Tell us more

This is what makes the fragmentary remains so important. Even if they are short on detail, they give us a good idea about what the rest of Euripides’ oeuvre was like. As the classicist Matthew Wright has emphasised, they tell us that he liked love stories; that he ‘had a penchant for lesser-known myths’; and that he was a more versatile, imaginative writer than either Sophocles or Aeschylus.

But there is a lot they don’t tell us. We don’t have enough information to reconstruct Euripides’ development as a playwright. We don’t know how he refined his art, or if his views changed over time. This is particularly galling as, if we did know this, it would help us to understand the nature and function of Greek tragedy during the most pivotal period in its history.

This is where the new discoveries come in. Over the past few decades there have been a handful of finds. In 2014 P.J. Finglass persuasively identified a papyrus fragment found in Oxyrhynchus as belonging to Euripides’ Ino. But these have tended to be rather limited. What sets the Colorado discovery apart is its scale. By any standards, 78 new lines is a huge leap forward.

So what do they tell us? Until they are published, it is difficult to be sure. But some tantalising details have already emerged. As we know from other sources, Polyidus begins with King Minos and Queen Pasiphae’s son drowning in a vat of honey. Devastated, they ask the seer Polyidus to resuscitate him using a herb that he has seen one snake use to revive another. What makes the new fragment significant is that it contains a discussion between Minos and Polyidus about the morality of bringing a dead person back to life.

The Ino is even more intriguing. According to a summary by Hyginus, Athamas, the king of Thessaly, marries Ino and has two children. When Ino vanishes, Athamas assumes she has died, so marries again and has another two sons. On learning that Ino is, in fact, alive, Athamas has her brought back to the palace. His second wife, Themisto, is understandably mad with jealousy. She plots to kill Ino’s children, but – mistaking Ino for a slave – unwittingly recruits her as an accomplice. Ino then tricks Themisto into killing her own sons. This drives Athamas mad. He kills his eldest son by Ino while hunting, whereupon Ino drowns herself and her younger son.

But how accurate was Hyginus’ summary? In Medea, Euripides’ chorus claims that Ino was driven mad by Hera and killed both of her own children. When she returns to sanity, she realises what she has done and kills herself. Since this version is unattested elsewhere, it presents us with a puzzle: was Hyginus mistaken? Or was Euripides just playing fast and loose with the story?

Fascinatingly, the new fragment suggests that Euripides introduced a wholly different element into the plot of Ino. According to Trnka-Amrhein, it has Athamas marrying a third wife – and casts Ino as the victim. ‘The third wife … is trying to eliminate Ino’s children’; but ‘Ino turns the tables on her, causing her to kill her own children and commit suicide’.

New credentials

Does this transform how we see Euripides as a dramatist? No. But it does add to it. The Polyidus bolsters Euripides’ philosophical credentials – perhaps lending credence to an ancient tradition which claimed that he came to drama after a career in philosophy. The Ino may reinforce the sense of tragic continuity between Euripides, Sophocles and Aeschylus – giving the lie to Nietzsche’s allegation that he was responsible for the ‘decline’ of Greek drama. For a tiny piece of papyrus, that’s a lot – and certainly ‘a big deal’.

Alexander Lee is a fellow in the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick. His latest book is Machiavelli: His Life and Times (Picador).