1 EURIPIDES' TROJAN WOMEN PREFACE, TRANSLATION, and ...

Performance History
The more popular plays were often revived in the fourth century. During these revivals
they were vulnerable to adaptation and additions by actors and producers. Around 330
BC, the Athenian politician Lycurgus prescribed that copies of the texts of the plays
should be deposited in official archives, and that future performances should conform to
these texts. These copies were lent to the Egyptian king, Ptolemy Euergetes I, and passed
into the library at Alexandria, to form the basis of the critical edition made by the
Librarian, Aristophanes of Byzantium (ca. 257-180 BC). Although the performance
tradition is not well documented for this period, 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 that survive were
the only ones which were still available for performance. Of Euripides there were ten
such plays, but a further nine of his survive, preserved in a manuscript which presents
them in a quasi-alphabetical order.
The Romans prized Euripides: Ennius (239-169 BC) adapted Andromache, Hecuba,
Iphigenia at Aulis, Medea; Pacuvius (c. 220-130 BC) Antiope; and Accius (170-?86 BC)
Alcestis, Bacchae, Hecuba, Medea, and Women of Troy. Half of the plays by Seneca (?1-
65 AD) are based wholly or partly on Euripides: Hercules Furens, Women of Troy,
Phoenician Women, Medea, and Phaedra.
After the Athenian Academy was closed in 529 AD, classical texts and performance
disappeared from sight for several centuries and did not reemerge until the revival of
learning in the early Byzantine period. Greek tragedy became known in the West mainly
through Latin translations, and came to Shakespeare via Seneca. Euripides' Medea,
Hippolytus, Alcestis and Andromache were first printed in Greek in Florence about 1494;
an edition of eighteen plays by Euripides followed in 1503.
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