95% of Ancient Greek Theater Is Gone. Here's How One Classicist Resurrected 500 Lost Playwrights
About this episode
James Romm discusses the lost works of ancient Greek playwrights and the role of Joannes Stobaeus in preserving their fragments.
Of the estimated 1,500 plays written in ancient Greece, only 33 complete works survive today—the rest were lost because medieval scribes deemed low-brow comedies and mass entertainment unworthy of expensive parchment during the transition from fragile papyrus to durable vellum, prioritizing canonical tragedies and Christian-compatible texts over Menander's seriocomic dramas and experimental works about shapeshifting heroes. The only reason we know anything about hundreds of these vanished plays is Joannes Stobaeus's fifth-century AD Anthologion, a four-volume anthology of excerpts from over 500 Greek authors compiled to educate his son Septimius, preserving bite-sized quotations that warn good people don't always prosper, power favors the shameless, and politics rarely rewards the just. Today's guest is James Romm, author of Since You're Mortal: Life Lessons from the Lost Greek Plays . We discuss how Stobaeus reveals lost works like Sophocles' Achilles' Lovers featured shapeshifting and humanized heroes far more experimental than surviving plays, why some of the lost plays may have deserved to disspear forever (sort of like VHS copies of B-movies like Deathbed: The Bed that…
People in this episode
Host: History Unplugged
Guest: James Romm
Topics covered
- ancient Greek theater
- lost playwrights
- Stobaeus
- translation of fragments
- cultural preservation
- comedy and tragedy
Keywords
- ancient Greece
- lost plays
- Greek authors
- theater history
- Stobaeus anthology
- playwrights
- cultural history
Mentioned in this episode
Books & works: Since You're Mortal: Life Lessons from the Lost Greek Plays, Anthologion, Achilles' Lovers, Deathbed: The Bed that Eats
Places: Greece
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