The Lost Plays of Sophocles
Seven plays survive of a hundred and twenty; titles for the rest.
- EXISTED
- 5th century BC, lost across late antiquity
- WHERE
- Athens, Greece
- LOST
- Gradually, by the Byzantine era
- CAUSE OF LOSS
- Simply not copied; papyrus rotted and was forgotten
Sophocles wrote some hundred and twenty plays and won the Athenian drama prize more often than any rival; Aeschylus wrote perhaps ninety, Euripides as many again. Together they were the glory of the Greek theatre, performed before whole cities. Of all that vast body of work, a few dozen plays survive, seven of Sophocles, seven of Aeschylus, and the rest are gone.
They were not burned in any single fire. They simply fell out of fashion, ceased to be copied as the centuries turned, and rotted on their papyrus rolls while a narrow selection was recopied for schools. We have the titles of dozens of lost tragedies, sometimes a quoted fragment, sometimes a single surviving line, enough to know that masterpieces existed, never enough to read them. It is the quietest way a thing can be lost: not destroyed, merely neglected.
Of perhaps a hundred and twenty plays by Sophocles, seven came down to us whole. The rest were never recopied as parchment replaced papyrus, and crumbled into nothing. We know many only by their titles, and a line or two quoted by others.