First consider the statistics for just the three great Athenian tragedians from the fifth century bce. Aeschylus wrote between seventy and ninety plays, of which only seven survive; Sophocles 123 plays, of which we also have only seven; and Euripides approximately ninety plays, of which we have nineteen (assuming Rhesus is authentic). In the fourth century bce Carcinus, for example, was credited with 160 plays and Astydamas with about 240 plays, not one ofwhich has survived. The output for each playwright, even a laggard like Aeschylus, is remarkable by today’s standards. So, without even calculating what all the other playwrights wrote, we have a grand total of thirty-three plays out of a possible 303, or approximately 11 percent of the total output of the three great tragedians. That is a tremendous amount of missing information. In other words, even if these three playwrights had more than a proportionate influence over what artists depicted, we still do not have most of what they wrote.
Nor do our scholarly woes stop here, for the playwrights sometimes wrote more than one play about the same figure. Aeschylus is credited with at least three plays about Prometheus, of which only Prometheus Bound has survived. Furthermore, the playwrights sometimes wrote plays that contradict each other, such as Euripides’ Telephus (in which Telephus is separated from his mother at birth) and Auge (in which the infant Telephus and his mother are set afloat in a chest). Certain subjects were treated by a number of different playwrights, like the plays on the house of Atreus. Yet scholars assume that a representation of a particular subject must depend on a particular text. Furthermore, if more than one playwright wrote on a particular topic, it is often assumed that the object depends on the play written by the most famous playwright in the list. If the object is from the archaic period, then Homer and epic are cited; if the object is from the fifth century bce and later, then it must go back to a dramatic source, even though the major epics are still in wide, if not wider, circulation than in the archaic period. The argumentation is circular:
1 The scene on the vase has names for characters that appeared in this or that play according to literary sources.
2 Therefore the scene must represent that play, the one by the playwright best known to us.
3 Hence we can add to our knowledge of what happened in that play from the information on this vase.
World History
