Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides between them composed nearly a quarter of the plays staged at the fifth-century Dionysia, each competing nearly once in every two years of his career. A few other playwrights accounted for many of the remaining productions: Aeschylus’ older contemporaries Choerilus, Phrynichus, and Pratinas; his son Euphorion and nephew Philocles; Aristarchus of Tegea, Neophron of Sicyon, Ion of Chios, Achaeus of Eretria, and Sophocles’ son lophon. Tragedy, it seems, was something of a closed shop. Its poets needed to be multitalented; only three could produce each year at the City Dionysia (and from the 430s two at the less prestigious Lenaea), and production was subject to high expectations from audiences, magistrates, and choregoi, all conscious of the festival’s religious and civic importance. The craft ran in families: Phrynichus, Pratinas, Aeschylus, and Sophocles all had tragedian sons (Polyphrasmon, Aristias, Euphorion, lophon), Sophocles a tragedian grandson (Sophocles II), and Aeschylus’ nephew Philocles was succeeded by two sons, a grandson, and two great-grandsons. Sons might collaborate or compete with their fathers (Iophon apparently did both), and might produce their fathers’ plays posthumously, as did Aristias and Euphorion (as well as another son of Sophocles, Ariston, and Euripides’ nephew Euripides). Apart from Agathon and perhaps Critias toward the end of the period, the other thirty or so fifth-century tragedians on record are now known only in a dozen play-titles and a couple of dozen lines of verse, and even for those just named the remains are pitifully small. Any account of fifth-century tragedy must inevitably be dominated by the three great trend-setters.
Evidence for lost tragedies falls loosely into five main types. First, fragmentary play-texts appear amongst the remains of ancient books, especially papyrus-texts rediscovered in modern times in the Egyptian semidesert. Secondly, since such texts were widely read and studied throughout antiquity, they figure in a great variety of other surviving texts - the parodies of Aristophanes, commentaries preserved amongst the papyri and in the margins of medieval manuscripts, quotations by literary authors such as Plutarch and Athenaeus, anthologies of well-known sayings, and a host of handbooks, encyclopedias, and grammar-books embodying hundreds of years of ancient scholarship. Thirdly, ancient summaries of the plays’ narrative content
(hypotheses) are preserved in some medieval manuscripts, and collections of them figure amongst the papyri and underlie some of the narratives in ancient mythological handbooks such as the Library of Apollodorus and the Fabulae of Hyginus. Fourthly, Latin tragedians of the republican period sometimes reproduced Greek models more or less closely - though the value of this now is limited as the Latin works themselves survive only in tenuous fragments. Lastly, there was a rich tradition of representing, or at least recalling, scenes from tragedy in art, especially painted pottery (durable and widespread), wall-paintings (now almost entirely lost), mosaics, and figured sculptures. (The relationship between artworks and dramatic texts and productions is now vigorously debated: see Small, chapter 7 in this volume.)
This sketch glosses over the many byways, complications, and problems that arise in assembling information about the lost works. Even in the best cases it is not possible to reconstruct a plot completely, let alone all of a play’s significant detail. Many plays are known largely through isolated quotations preserved for purposes that had nothing to do with the study of the plays themselves. Sophocles’ Phaedra, which handled the same story as Euripides’ Hippolytus and Seneca’s Phaedra, is known through seventeen such fragments comprising twenty-six lines, and Euripides’ first Hippolytus is barely better served. The eighty-four fragments of Ion of Chios, more numerous than those of any other lost tragedian, include fifty-four words or phrases found in ancient reference works and twenty snippets from Athenaeus’ conversational miscellany Deipnosophistai. The surviving information nevertheless serves to provide some context for the extant plays and broaden our understanding of tragedy as a genre.
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