The Lost Plays of Greek Tragedy (Volume 2)

Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides

Matthew Wright

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781474276481
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Drama
• Index: Literature

The surviving works of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides have been familiar to readers and theatregoers for centuries; but these works are far outnumbered by their lost plays. Between them these authors wrote around two hundred tragedies, the fragmentary remains of which are utterly fascinating. In this, the second volume of a major new survey of the tragic genre, Matthew Wright offers an authoritative critical guide to the lost plays of the three best-known tragedians. (The other Greek tragedians and their work are discussed in Volume 1: Neglected Authors.) What can we learn about the lost plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides from fragments and other types of evidence? How can we develop strategies or methodologies for 'reading' lost plays? Why were certain plays preserved and transmitted while others disappeared from view? Would we have a different impression of the work of these classic authors – or of Greek tragedy as a whole – if a different selection of plays had survived? This book answers such questions through a detailed study of the fragments in their historical and literary context. Making use of recent scholarly developments and new editions of the fragments, The Lost Plays of Greek Tragedy makes these works fully accessible for the first time.

1

Aeschylus

According to his ancient biographer, ‘Aeschylus was a young man when he took up the art of tragedy, but he greatly surpassed his predecessors in terms of his poetry, his stagecraft, the splendour of his productions, the costumes of his actors, and the grandeur of his choruses.’ The Suda adds that Aeschylus was just twenty-five at the time of his first production: this was between 500 and 496 BCE, when he competed at the City Dionysia against Pratinas and Choerilus.¹ He did not win a first prize till 484, but his plays were recognized for their ambition and their distinctive artistic qualities.² Aeschylus is credited, in a motley collection of sources, with many theatrical innovations: it is said that he increased the number of speaking actors to either two or three; revolutionized tragic choreography; took an interest in costumes, masks, props and the whole mise-en-scène; and greatly enhanced the visual element of theatrical performance.³ The reliability of much of this information is open to doubt. What is beyond a doubt, however, is that Aeschylus’ emergence on the Athenian cultural scene caused a big splash. During his career, and in part because of his influence, tragedy developed into a major art form, on a bigger scale than ever before.

Thus it is regrettable that all the surviving plays of Aeschylus (with the exception of Prometheus Bound, which is probably spurious) belong to the latter part of his career. They range in date from Persians (472) to the Oresteia (456), leaving almost three crucial decades unaccounted for. Any prospect of charting the evolution of the genre, or of contrasting early- with late-period Aeschylus, is ruled out. (Before the discovery that the archaic-seeming Suppliant Women was a late work, dating to c. 465–59, this sort of activity used to be a favourite pastime of scholars.) But the lost plays can go some way towards filling the gap in our knowledge. Frustratingly, none of them can be dated except Women of Aetna (476–5), Glaucus of Potniae (472), Phineus (472), Laius (467), Oedipus (467) and Daughters of Danaus (465–59), all of which are late-period works. But many of these plays must have belonged to the first half of Aeschylus’ career, and there are reasons for thinking that Daughters of Nereus and Myrmidons in particular are very early.

Aeschylus wrote a lot of plays, but their exact number is unknown. Our sources give contradictory figures, ranging from seventy to ninety, and it is unclear how many of these plays were tragedies. Several medieval manuscripts include a Catalogue of Aeschylean drama, containing seventy-three titles, but this list is not infallible: some of the titles are unattested elsewhere, some of the spellings are uncertain and at least eight known plays are mysteriously omitted.⁴ The pages that follow include an entry for every known lost work that is or may have been tragic. One can argue over individual cases and specific details, but where the genre is ambiguous, I say so explicitly. By my count there are fifty-nine plays here.

A glance at Radt’s edition of the fragments reveals that Aeschylus’ lost plays are, in a real sense, more lost than those of Sophocles or Euripides.⁵ There are considerably fewer fragments, and even those traces that survive tend to be much smaller and less revealing. The reason for this is partly mysterious, like so many aspects of the textual transmission of ancient literature. Why should the works of such a celebrated author have fallen into such obscurity? There is no easy answer to that question. But one explanation for the comparative scarcity of fragments is that Aeschylus’ plays probably contained relatively few excerptable lines, such as maxims (gnômai), which were so frequently preserved by anthologists and in which the plays of Euripides especially abound. At the same time there are proportionally more lexicographic fragments, no doubt because Aeschylus’ Greek vocabulary includes many recherché words.

Another problem which arises in relation to Aeschylus more than the other playwrights concerns the connections between plays. Did Aeschylus conceive of each of them as a free-standing drama, complete in itself, or as a constituent part of a grander design? It is clear that Aeschylus did – at least sometimes – write trilogies or tetralogies connected by a single sequential storyline or unifying theme. Apart from the surviving Oresteia of 458 BCE (which concluded with the satyr-drama Proteus, now lost),⁶ three such connected groups of plays are attested:

1. Theban tetralogy (467 BCE): Laius, Oedipus, Seven against Thebes (tragic); Sphinx (satyric)⁷;

2. Danaid tetralogy (c. 465–59 BCE): Suppliant Women, Egyptians(?), Daughters of Danaus (tragic); Amymone (satyric)⁸;

3. Lycurgeia tetralogy (date unknown): Edonians, Bassarai, Youths (tragic); Lycurgus (satyric).⁹

Scholars have tended to assume that this sort of tightly connected unit represented the normal practice of tragedians in the earlier part of the fifth century, but was later abandoned; or, at any rate, it has traditionally been thought that Aeschylus had a preference for connected tetralogies. On the basis of this assumption, scholars have conjecturally ‘reconstructed’ further trilogies and tetralogies by arranging all Aeschylus’ known titles into connected groups of three or four plays. The results of these experiments show that numerous different permutations are possible, some of them more convincing than others.¹⁰ Nevertheless, it is far from certain that Aeschylus’ titles should be grouped together in this way. (Just imagine a scenario in which all that remained of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone was their titles and a few fragments: it would be easy to assume that these plays too formed a trilogy, but we happen to know that this would be mistaken.)

Too little is known about the conventions that determined the relationship between plays in a production. We simply do not have enough information about festivals or performance records to be confident about what constituted normal practice, either for Aeschylus or for anyone else.¹¹ All that can be said for certain is that both connected and unconnected trilogies and tetralogies are attested throughout the classical period. More importantly, it is obviously not the case that Aeschylus invariably wrote connected suites of plays, since we know of a further production in which it is hard to detect any connection at all between the four individual plays. This was his tetralogy of 472 BCE, consisting of the tragic Phineus, Persians, Glaucus of Potniae and the satyric Prometheus.¹²

I am not trying to deny that numerous connections (of one sort or another) will have existed between individual works by Aeschylus. Probably the majority of the plays listed below were originally performed in groups rather than as single dramas – though if they were not invariably staged at the Athenian Greater Dionysia we cannot even be sure about that. On the whole, however, given the great uncertainties involved, I prefer to discuss each play separately and leave it to others to speculate on potential links between them. (The reader is warned that this is one way in which this book differs significantly from other publications on Aeschylus.)

Despite all this uncertainty and doubt, there are things that can confidently be said about Aeschylus’ lost works and his oeuvre as a whole. What is obvious is that the six or seven surviving plays give a very incomplete picture of Aeschylean tragedy. They represent a small minority of the total, and they cannot be regarded as a particularly representative selection. The sheer range and variety that we can glimpse in the remains of these fifty-nine other plays makes it difficult to generalize. Indeed, the most striking thing about the subject-matter, even if we cannot tell exactly how it was treated, is just how diverse it is. On the basis of the remains, it is impossible to discern such a thing as a ‘typical’ Aeschylean myth or plot structure, or a ‘typical’ Aeschylean hero or heroine. The tone is also difficult to judge from fragments, but the stories themselves imply that there will have been a fairly extensive spectrum, from the grim to the light-hearted or even humorous.

These tragedies took their material from many sources, ranging freely across the entire expanse of Greek myth. Nevertheless, one can tentatively identify a few recurrent themes and topics, such as the deaths of children (Athamas; Niobe; Cretan Women), the punishment of humans by gods (Daughters of Helios; Ixion; Niobe; Women of Perrhaebia; Toxôtides; Phineus), love and marr...