1 The Living Art of Greek Tragedy Marianne McDonald, Ph.D., MRIA ...

Although the performance tradition is not well-documented for this period, it obviously
continued. The plays continued to be widely read, and scholars in Alexandria wrote
commentaries on them, parts of which still survive. But by the second to third century AD., the
number of plays that were being read had diminished. The seven plays of Aeschylus and the
seven of Sophocles which survive were the only ones which were still commonly read at this
time. Of Euripides there were ten such plays, but a further nine of his survive through a lucky
accident, preserved in a manuscript which presents them in a quasi-alphabetical order (they
evidently formed one part of a collection representing The Complete Euripides).
After the Athenian Academy was closed in 529 AD, classical texts disappeared from
sight for several centuries and did not reemerge until the revival of learning in the early
Byzantine period. Very few manuscripts of the plays will have survived into this period. Those
that did are now lost again, but before they were lost, they were copied and recopied, often by
scribes who did not understand what they were copying. The result is that the manuscripts which
we possess (dating from the 10th century onwards) are usually very corrupt, and one is often
unable to recover the playwright's original words. The plays that were most popular in Byzantine
times were Aeschylus' Persians, Prometheus and Seven Against Thebes, Sophocles' Ajax, Electra
and Oedipus Tyrannus, and Euripides' Hecuba, Orestes, and Phoenician Women.
Europe.
Printed texts of all three playwrights were available from the early sixteenth century in
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