Greek drama is a complex of poetry, music, song, dance, and spectacle, and the original audience received the impact of the whole complex in its day-long sessions in the Theatre of Dionysos. The original audience was steeped in a continuous tradition of drama: an old man who saw the Persae in 472 could have seen the first tragedy of Thespis in 534, and a very old man who saw Menander’s Dyskolos in 317 might just have been taken as a child to Aristophanes’ Plutus in 388. We on the other hand have only texts, always damaged by the passage of years and sometimes irreparably disfigured, and texts of a mere handful of plays produced between 472 and about 300.

The papyrus fragments of lost plays which do not belong to the same productions as the preserved plays add a little information about the poet’s technique. It is sad that the Niobe passage (277) has lost the beginnings of the lines, so that it is still impossible to say whether the speaker is Niobe or another, or indeed whether the twenty-one lines should be divided between two speakers. It is, however, certain that they are addressed to the chorus (described in another fragment as exotic in appearance), that they announce the future arrival of Tantalos, and that the words to which Plato objected, ‘god plants a cause in men when he wants to ruin a house’, are only the prelude to the normal Aeschylean view of the dangers of prosperity, which Niobe had demonstrated by boasting of her children’s beauty. Aristophanes in the Frogs (911) implies that Niobe was present silent from the beginning (the ekkyklema must have been used to bring her on, seated on her children’s tomb) and remained silent while the chorus sang a long song. It is therefore possible that this is Niobe’s first speech to the chorus.

Papyri have produced much less new information about Sophocles than about the other two tragic poets. Fragments of the Manteis or Polyidos (P. Oxy. 2453) tell us extremely little; fragments ascribed to the Theseus (P. Oxy. 2452) give a lyric dialogue between Ariadne and Eriboia, one of the Athenian maidens, and Theseus describing his labours to a sympathizer. The difficulty is that Sophocles’ Theseus is very badly attested, and in one of the fragments the language is extremely like Euripides, into whose Theseus the fragments would fit admirably. These fragments may therefore have to be given to Euripides like the papyri formerly attributed to Sophocles’ Assembly of Achaeans.

In recent years, as earlier, papyri have given us more information about Euripides than about either of the other two tragic poets. A long collection of hypotheseis of plays, arranged in alphabetical order, tells us less than we might have hoped because it is in such a bad state, but adds a lot of useful detail. Another collection was evidently arranged by stories so that a summary of the Peliades (which tells a little more about Euripides’ first play) is followed by a summary of the Medea and that presumably by a summary of the Aigeus. It is interesting to know that mythographers had both sorts of collection to draw on.