The Ancients - Sophocles' Lost Plays

Episode Date: October 18, 2020

The Big Three. In antiquity it could mean a whole host of different things, the triumvirate of Caesar, Pompey and Crassus for instance. But for many, ‘The Big Three’ means the three great tragedians of Ancient Greece we know so well today: Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Today’s podcast is all about Sophocles, the creator of famous plays such as Oedipus Rex, Ajax and Antigone.Seven of his plays survive in full, but believe it or not this is but a morsel of the many works that Sophocles created. Fragments of more than 100 other plays written by Sophocles have been uncovered. Though only snippets survive, and in various forms, they have provided valuable insights into Sophocles’ career and how he wrote much more than just tragedy. Even more extraordinary, to this day new fragments continue to be studied. They continue to reveal more about Sophocles and his works, slowly adding more pieces to the puzzle that is this famous dramatist - and ancient Greek drama as a whole. Sophocles may have been living over 2,500 years ago, but his story is far from over.I was delighted to be joined by Dr Lyndsay Coo, a leading expert on Sophocles and his lost plays, to talk through the life and legacy of this famous dramatist. We first talk about Sophocles and his seven surviving plays, before going on to the many, many fragments that survive and their significance. This was an enthralling and eye-opening chat. Enjoy.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. The Big Three, it could mean a whole host of things in antiquity. It could mean the first triumvirate of Julius Caesar, Pompey and Crassus. It could mean the second triumvirate of Octavian, Mark Antony and Lepidus.

For me, I immediately think of the immediate aftermath of Alexander the Great's death and the three key players then, Perdiccas, Craterus and Antipater. But for many, when someone mentions the big three, they immediately think of the three great tragedians of ancient Greece, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. And this podcast is all about Sophocles, and in particular, looking at Sophocles' lost plays. Because although seven of his plays survive in full to this day, he wrote so much more. And joining me to talk about these fragments, these lost plays of Sophocles, I was delighted to be joined by Dr Lindsay Koo from the University of Bristol. Lindsay, as you're about to find out, she is a fantastic communicator. She's a brilliant

speaker. She is enthralling with her communication. So it was absolutely amazing to have her on the show to talk through the topic of Sophocles' lost plays. Here's Lindsay. Lindsay, it's fantastic to have you on the show. Thanks for having me. No problem, no problem. And especially for a topic like this, because we're talking about Sophocles, one of the greatest tragedians of the ancient world, but this time we're looking at his lost plays. That's right.

Yeah, I think people are often a bit surprised to suddenly remember that he didn't just write the seven plays that people have today. That would have been a very kind of short career if that's all that he'd done. He actually wrote, we think, about over 120 plays. So many, many more than we're accustomed to thinking of. And looking at those can really make us think in really fresh ways about who he was as a dramatist. Absolutely. It seems to emphasise, and we were talking about this just now, isn't it, how in all aspects of literature and ancient history, there is so much that we've lost and that we only have a snippet of what was actually written from antiquity. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think if you look at the percentage of what it is that we have in terms of the likely material that was produced, not just in drama, but across all different kinds of media, it's actually quite horrible to think about it and how much we have

lost. And I think what's so interesting in the case of someone like Sophocles is that the tiny proportion of things that have survived have then had such a profound influence on the way that we think not just about him but actually about tragedy as a whole genre, ancient drama, the ancient theatre. So you have this kind of paradox where a very tiny amount of material has shaped the way that we think about this entire lost whole. Absolutely, because you mentioned earlier how he is one of, in tragedy's terms, the big three.

Yes, that's right. So I think when people talk about Greek tragedy nowadays, what we really are using that term as a shorthand for often is to refer to Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, the big three as they're sometimes termed. So these are three of the dramatists who were competing writing in the 5th century BC. And the reason that we tend to use tragedy just to mean those three is because they are the only tragedians whose works have survived complete. the only tragedians whose works have survived complete. So unsurprisingly, because they're the only full examples we have of the genre, we tend to just assimilate tragedy with those three particular figures. But of course, it was so much more than that. Of course, of course. Well, let's focus on Sophocles then. And let's start with his background. Normally, when I ask people about people's backgrounds and antiquity, we normally don't know too much, so forgive me for asking this question, but what do we really know

about Sophocles' background? Because this is in the early 5th century BC? Yeah, he was born around 496. He dies around 406-405, so he lives until he's 90 years or so, a really good long life. And he's actually active as a dramatist for over six decades of that. So he has this incredibly prolific, long, successful career. So we think of him primarily now as a dramatist, but actually he was also active in other ways in public life, he held various state positions. When we're looking at biographical accounts of him, as with so many figures, it can be a little bit hard to separate the fact from the fiction. So there are certainly some

stories about him, which seem to be a bit kind of fanciful, and perhaps actually based on elements from his works themselves. This is quite a common thing that happens, something that he says in a drama that a character says is then assimilated into the life of the creator of that work. And we also have various other kind of stories about him which relate him to Aeschylus and Euripides. There's a kind of desire to see him as that middle figure who's not so old-fashioned as Aeschylus, but not quite as modern as Euripides and so some of the stories also seem to be a later impulse of fitting him into that very nice little arc and again we don't know how true those are. Indeed and it sounds from what you're saying that most of the stories we know

about Sophocles are surrounding his work in tragedy and in that in drama but you mentioned that he seems to have held office and some high offices in Athens beforehand. Do we know how Sophocles moves towards the dramatic sphere, moves into that sort of work, as it were? Not really, no. I mean, we're told, for example, that his first victory in the dramatic festivals is in 468. He overlaps in the early part of his career with Aeschylus and then in the latter half with Euripides. I don't think we really know much about how it was that he came to produce tragedies and satyr dramas. As I said, a lot of this is fairly uncertain when we look at the biographical tradition.

And at this high time in classical Athens following the Persian Wars, how important is the performing of drama for classical Athens? Really important. I mean, the drama plays a really interesting, really central role in ancient Athenian society. And it's happening not just in Athens, but we tend to focus in on Athens when we talk about the genre. So one important thing is to really get rid of any modern preconceptions about what going to the theatre means when we look at the 5th century Athens. Nowadays we tend to think of going to the theatre as something that you do in the evening, you sit inside, you've probably paid to be there, it's seen as something quite elite,

whereas drama in the 5th century in Athens held a really kind of central civic place, it was actually part of dramatic festivals. So most often when we're looking at tragedy, we're talking about the plays that were performed at an annual festival called the Great Dionysia or the City Dionysia. And this is a religious festival in worship of the god Dionysus, the god of wine, but also the god of theatre. The theatres are huge, they're obviously outdoors so you're kind of sitting with lots of your fellow citizens and if you go to the theatre you're there for several days because the dramatic festival goes on not just over one day but over several. So if you go

to watch tragedies and satyr dramas you're there for three days watching all of them. So it's a completely different kind of conception of what we think about experiencing theatre. And it holds this really important central place in terms of the way that people were encouraged to think of themselves as part of the city. So going to the theatre and experiencing it with your fellow citizens in this great space, which is right at the foot of the Acropolis, very different from modern ideas of the theatre. Absolutely. It seems to really emphasise, it really seems to be a central part of the classical city's identity. Yes, definitely. Scholars have argued, have looked at all the different ways in which theatre seems to be really deeply enmeshed in Athenian ways of thinking about themselves. So that going to the theatre, watching these characters play certain scenarios

and choices out on stage is also a way of prompting you to think about your own identity, including in relation to the city or wherever it is that you happen to come from. It's certainly been argued that it is meant to be more than just a nice day out, but it's actually encouraging you to reflect a bit further. What do we know about the people who performed the plays, who created the plays, the tragedians themselves? Do they have to come from quite a rich background to be able to follow that line of work? So I think certainly we think he was from a comfortable background because of where he ends up. Once again, it's kind of hard to know because a lot of, as I

say, a lot of the biographical information we have for these figures can be rather difficult to pull apart the truth from later fabrications. But yeah, I mean, it's unlikely that you would be able to be successful in this way if you were coming from very little education, for example. A lot of these works really show profound knowledge of myth, but also of great literary technique, of deep into textuality with other works. So I think we'd certainly have to assume a certain kind of profile for some of these figures. Absolutely. And it's showing their profile. I love what you were saying earlier, how getting into this modern conception of theatre, you know, maybe you'll go to the theatre once a month or maybe once a year or once half a year. But here in these festivals, you'd watch several different plays over one, two, three days in a row. Yeah, exactly. And more than that. So again, the tragedies and the

satyr dramas are just a small part of the whole festival. So it actually starts with other kinds of competitions, choral competitions, where you'd have choirs of men and boys singing and those would represent the tribes of Athens. Then you would have the presentation of the tragedies and the satyr dramas that had been pre-selected to compete that year. So each playwright is offering a programme of three tragedies followed by a satyr drama. So that's quite a long day at the theatre, you've got to sit through those four different works. And we really have to think of the plays as being part of that full programme. And for example, in the case of Avesculus, he very often connected those four plays, so that the four different instalments,

three tragedies and a satyr drama, told a kind of continuous story or dealt with the same, perhaps the same family, maybe several generations of it or something that was connected. And then at the end of that, you also had the comedies. So it really is a completely different, quite immersive, really involved way of thinking about going to the theatre. And talking about Sophocles in particular, you mentioned that link between tragedies, as it were, to keep on that theme if people are watching them one after another. I think perhaps the most famous trio of Sophocles is the Theban trio. Do you think this was why Sophocles might have done this? Because thinking of these three plays being performed in a row? That's actually a bit of a

misnomer. They are often referred to as the Theban trilogy, but that's only because we now group them together because they all deal with the members of the same family. They weren't presented as a trilogy and they're actually really far apart in terms of their dating. And they're not in the chronological order of the events that happens in them. So the Oedipus at Colonna's example was actually his very last play performed posthumously. the Oedipus at Colonna's example was actually his very last play performed posthumously. So this is again a kind of distorting effect of the fact that only those seven have survived. We're so desperate to see the links between them that we put those three together when actually they were separated by quite a lot of years. Having said that, I mean, of course, what we do see in those plays, which deal with the same characters, so Oipus and his daughter's Antigone

and his meanie and his sons we do see Sophocles returning again to themes and ideas and characters that he's treated previously so I think you know it's not unreasonable to to think that he obviously he was aware of what he'd written earlier and that he was developing and coming back to returning to characters that he had treated but they weren't originally grouped together in their performance okay okay my bad and what are the recurring themes that we see well let's focus on those three Theban plays first of all what are some of the main recurring themes we see in them so if we just kind of go through them really quickly, we've got Oedipus the king, which of course tells the story of Oedipus who discovers that he has in fact killed his own father and

married his own mother and had children with her. And in response to that discovery, he puts out in his own eyes. In Antigone, we pick up the story of his daughter Antigone and his sons Polynices and Eutychles who have killed each other, one defending the city of Thebes and one attacking it. The king Creon decrees that the traitor Polynices cannot be buried and his sister Antigone defies the law in order to bury him and is herself sentenced to death. And then Oedipus at Colonus, which is the one that people always forget about, is the aged Oedipus at the end of his life, who's been exiled, comes to Athens, accompanied by Antigone. And there he is, kind of, he dies, but in some way, he becomes transformed into a protective presence for the city as a whole. So you can see those are not, I've kind of played around a little bit

with chronological order there. So the themes that we can see, especially in the Oedipus and the Antigone, are in each case we have a kind of strong figure who the drama is based on, whether that's Oedipus or Antigone, who is kind of faced with some crisis or some great decision, makes the decision and kind of pursues that irresolutely to the conclusion. So in the case of Oedipus, he's so determined to find out who the killer of Laius is, that he's so determined not to let this question go and to follow it to the end. And obviously, what he finds there is that it's actually himself. And in the case of Antigone, she is absolutely determined to bury her brother, even though she

knows that this is going to lead to her death. So the similarities there have often led people to think about this being a kind of trademark of Sophoclean tragedy. It's often referred to as the Sophoclean hero, this idea of a figure who is so uncompromising, often quite stubborn, often quite kind of unattractive in that. Other figures try and persuade them to change their mind, but they just don't listen. So I think that's certainly one major theme that comes through from that particular selection of plays, this idea of a heroic figure who sticks to their guns, you know, no matter what, even when it actually turns out not to be so great for them in the end. There's also issues, of course, of family, as we'd expect, with this particularly complex set of characters.

We're thinking about the relationships between parents and children, between siblings, and how when we look at this particular family, which is marked by patricide, by incest, by the constant turning in of family relations on one another, it gets us to think through how those relationships can go so catastrophically wrong and what kinds of situations they can be tested under as well. And then another big one would be, especially with the Oedipus, the question of fate. So was he always fated to do these?

How does that relate to the decisions that he seems to be making for himself in the play? So, yeah, lots of really kind of juicy themes that we could get into there. Absolutely. The stubborn hero, fate, family. I mean, are these themes, these really major themes, which can really appeal, I can imagine, to an audience, are they why, especially the characters of Oedipus and Antigone, continue to be so popular down to the present day? Yeah, I think so. I mean, they touch on really big questions, right? the characters of Oedipus and Antigone continue to be so popular down to the present day? Yeah, I think so. I mean, they touch on really big questions, right? The nature of fate, of the role of the gods, of what's predetermined, how our decisions earlier on in life can lead to later consequences. So that's certainly one way in which they touch on questions that are kind of

understandable and relevant, even though these characters experience them obviously in really magnified circumstances. But the reason that those two figures in particular have been so popular is also a result of the way that many, many generations of audiences and readers and especially thinkers and theorists have engaged with these two texts. So with Oedipus, we have Aristotle very early on in the reception of Sophocles, who singles this play out as having really excellent qualities. And then of course, jumping ahead in time, we have the Oedipus complex, we have the engagement of psychoanalysis with this figure, as someone who is paradigmatic for thinking through aspects of the human condition. So I think probably most people are familiar with Oedipus through that particular intervention in his history, that we know immediately that he gives rise to this particular modern idea about psychology. And in the case of Antigone, because

she's such an engaging figure, this idea of a young teenage girl who stands up to state authority in defence of what she thinks is right, that has been immensely appealing to audiences across many ages. We get, you know, the romantic poets engaging with her, we get a really strong Victorian reception of her seeing her almost as a Christian martyr, you know, going to her death for what she thinks is right. And in more modern scenarios, we get her being thought of as a paradigm for quite modern forms of resistance, right, women especially, who are able to stand up to state authority. So I think there's also a certain timelessness about these characters, which means they can be picked up and adapted to all

kinds of new circumstances, political circumstances, which obviously are very different from what Sophocles was thinking of. Well, no, it is extraordinary, the lifespan, the longevity of these stories and how they remain popular throughout history. And especially in regards to Antigone, does it really emphasise, because back then, obviously her determination to bury her brother, that must have been also really emphatic for the audience when we consider how important death and burial rites were at that time? Absolutely. I mean, this is a really fundamental thing, right? So we do have some texts which talk about traitors not being allowed to be buried within the city boundaries, for

example. But we all know, kind of in ancient Greek culture, that to not be buried, to be thrown out, you know, for the dogs and the birds to eat, is something really horrific in terms of religious thought, as well as, I guess, what we might call morality. Ideas like that go all the way back to Homer. So we find the mutilation of Hector's corpse by Achilles, and he leaves him out to rot, and the gods are so kind of horrified by this, they actually preserve the body to stop it from decaying. So on the one hand, yeah, there's something really undeniably correct about what she's doing. And that, in fact, is affirmed within the play itself. On the other hand, we do have a young girl openly defying her uncle, who is now her legal guardian, the head of her

family, the king of the city. She's totally obstinate. She doesn't listen to any kind of common sense. She's from a family that has not made very good decisions in the past anyway. So there is, I think, this kind of really fruitful, really rich clash of the ways that the audience would have responded to her as a character. I mean, they probably might have agreed in principle with what she was doing, but they'd have been horrified if their own daughters had done this. So there's that tension, I think, between these two different sides of it. Do you think that that was something that Sophocles really wants to emphasise in his audience, this, they're not exactly sure how to react with their emotions?

Yeah, I mean, very often things are not black and white. And sometimes when they appear to be, it's actually kind of ironic. So I'm thinking here of Sophocles' Electra, a play in which Electra and Orestes murder their own mother by the end of the play and this play has been subject to lots of different interpretations. On the face of it, it seems as though they have no misgivings whatsoever, they just kind of forge ahead, they never question the correctness of what they're doing, avenging that their mother killed their father, so that they're taking revenge for that.

But then many modern readers especially have thought, well, this must be deeply ironic, right? It seems as though everything's black and white, but it can't be because it's about matricide. So I think, yeah, there's always more layers than might appear on the first glance. You mentioned Electra just there. So let's have a look at those four other plays that we know of. So what are these four other plays? Right, so we've got the Ajax about the suicide of the hero at Troy. We have the Philictetes. This is another Trojan War play about the hero Philictetes,

who at very near the start of the Trojan War was bitten by a snake. The wound separated and became really smelly and disgusting. His comrades couldn't bear to be in the presence of it, so they just abandoned him on an island. But then at the end of the war, it turns out they actually need him to win it, so they go and try and get him back. We have the Women of Trachis, which tells the story of Deionira, the wife of Heracles, who ends up killing her husband essentially by accident. She thinks that what she's given him is a love potion but it turns out to be poison. So we have this great paradox where the manliest of Greek heroes is killed by his incredibly feminine wife.

Is that all the ones that we've talked about? Yeah. Then we have Electra don't you? And Electra yeah which we've mentioned. I mean, from what you're saying there, it's quite staggering, the importance, the amount of tragedies from this period that seem to really be focused either on the Trojan War or just mythology. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the Trojan War is a favourite topic of Sophocles. This is another way in which the fragments have kind of distorted our conception of him because, as you said at the start,

we tend to think of him as the Theban plays. We think that he wrote about edifice and antigone and that family but actually when we look at all of the fragments by far the most common thing he wrote about was troy was the trojan epic cycle he he just loved that material and we get writers in antiquity who even refers him as a tragic Homer, because he becomes so closely identified with that particular set of mythology. But this dealing so much with myth and mythological characters is a pattern that we find not just with Sophocles, but really across the genre as a whole. So it's kind of well known that in general, the genre of tragedy doesn't really tend to treat real life people, historical events, but it likes to look back into that mythical time and to use those characters. I mean, very often to think through contemporary ideas, to engage with things that would have been relevant to the time of the audience, but it does it by looking back to previous mythical generations. to the time of the audience, but it does it by looking back to previous mythical generations.

Ah, so they use it as a scope, as a way, as a medium to reflect current issues, but they reflect it through mythology. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think very similar to, you know, drama and forms of creative output in all different times and places. I think it's very hard for any artistic work to be entirely divorced from resonances from the society and the culture in which it's very hard for any artistic work to be entirely divorced from resonances from the society and the culture in which it's produced but the way that tragedy most often does that is by looking back to these big mythological figures that the audience would have been really aware of as well so that's interesting because you're also interacting with a kind of cultural knowledge they have of these figures with all the other plays and poems and songs they might have already

heard about these figures with the artwork that plays and poems and songs they might have already heard about these figures with the artwork that they would have seen representing them. So they become part of this really rich cultural network, contributing to contemporary thought, but thinking through these familiar figures. It seems exactly that. I mean, especially from what you were saying, how the fragments seem to reveal that Sophocles focused largely on the Trojan War, it suggests that he expected his audience to have this knowledge of the Trojan War beforehand. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the Trojan epic cycle, including Meliod and the Odyssey, but also many other epics, which also now sadly are lost to us, was just kind of bread and butter stuff, right? I mean, his audience would have known these myths, would have been really familiar with them. And because of that, you can play on that knowledge, you can

subvert it, you can introduce kind of surprising elements. You're starting from a shared cultural heritage of these figures, which forms a backdrop to these plays. And from what you were saying earlier, so the fragments that we've found and sounds like we're continuing to find, they are revealing this different side of Sophocles. And one of the first things is that actually he focused most of his plays on the Trojan War itself. Yes, it's not most, not a kind of overall majority, but proportionately he looked at that material far more than any other epic tradition. And yeah, so we have over 40 or so plays that both tragedies and satyr dramas that really engaged with this material. And one interesting thing is that he

uses kind of every single part of that set of myths to create drama. So we think that he probably wrote a play about in the very beginning of the Trojan War story, which is actually Zeus deciding to bring about an event that's going to clear the population of the earth. And that may have been a satyr drama. And then we also have a play about the death of Odysseus, so the death of the very last hero to get home from the war. So he's really covering this material fully in his long career, which I remember spans over six decades. He's almost kind of creating his own kind of epic cycle in a way by writing plays about all these different characters and all these different episodes from that set of myths. Now, forgive my complete ignorance, but what is the difference between a satire drama and a tragedy?

So that's a really good question. What is the difference between a satire drama and a tragedy? So that's a really good question. And once again, the fact that we so often refer to soft clues as a tragedian shows the distortion that the surviving plays have had because the seven plays that survive are tragedies. But in the ancient world, you couldn't just be a tragedian. You had to write tragedy and satire drama. So as I said earlier, the format of the dramatic competition at the

Great Dionysia was that you competed with a set of four plays, three tragedies followed by a satyr drama. So by necessity, anyone who's a tragedian is also writing satyr plays. So these are plays where the chorus is made up of satyrs. And these are the half-man, half-equid creatures that are the companions of Dionysus. We very often see them on ancient vase painting. The things that they're really renowned for are drunkenness, libido, being permanently in kind of states of sexual arousal, that being full of bravado, but actually quite cowardly when it comes to taking action. So they're completely different to these really sober, serious figures that we think of when we think of tragedy. So if you think about the viewing experience for the audience, they've sat through these three plays,

which not always, but often tended to have quite sombre things happening in them. Quite heavy, yeah. I mean, they don't always end unhappily. Some of them actually end quite well, but there's, you know, a serious tone. And then the actors would go off, recostume, come back on for the final play, and they've transformed themselves into these kind of cavorting, drunken satyrs. And what very often happens in these plays is, again, they're mythically based. So they take as their subject a familiar myth from previous tradition, and they just kind of drop the satyrs into it, where they cause lots of mayhem by attempting to insert themselves into the myth, by attempting to be the hero,

by attempting to, you know, rape the women or kind of otherwise insert themselves into these stories. to, you know, rape the women or kind of otherwise insert themselves into these stories. So it's a kind of subversive comic take on these traditional stories. And it's really important that that's the last play the audience would have watched that day. That's the final image that they would have gone out of the theatre having experienced. The satyrs, of course, are the companions of Dionysus. They're his followers and they worship him. And we need to remember that the whole context of the festival is in worship of Dionysus. So it could be a way of reaffirming the connection of drama with its patron god as that last image that the audience had as they left the theatre. It definitely feels quite more lighthearted, doesn't it, after you saying after three quite

heavy plays to have something like that at the end of the day. Yeah, absolutely. So again, people have advanced many, many different theories as to what Satyajrama is doing as part of the tragic competitions. I mean, one fairly influential theory is exactly that, that it's comic relief, right? That it would have just been too much to sit through three plays of people blinding themselves and terrible kinds of deaths and family curses and so on, and that this would have been more light-hearted. I think that that's not always the case. As I said, some tragedies actually end on a fairly uplifting note. So we might have a cycle of violence, but it might end in some resolution. So I think that often is

a little bit too simplistic. But certainly what we do have is this drastic shift in tone. And also we're entering a completely different kind of world with the satyr drama in that it is fantastical. You can't imagine, you know, Inidipus the king, you know, a satyr suddenly turning up. There's two different world views that would collide there. world views that would collide there. And very often in satyr drama, we find much greater use, for example, of kind of monster figures, of ogre figures, of magical objects, of the gods being characters as well. So they're not just changing the tone and changing the chorus's identity, but they're almost shifting us into a parallel universe where we have the same mythical figures, but we're now in this fantastical world of the satyrs, and many more types of things are possible

there. And in regards to the fragments, how many of the fragments of Sophocles that survive off his plays, roughly how many of these are of satyr plays that we know of? That's a good question. Again, one of the interesting things about the fragments is that the satyr dramas are actually some of the best represented of his works. So the play for which we have the most extensive papyrus fragment of Sophocles is actually a satyr drama, it's the Acnuti or the Trackers. So that's a really important one. We also have fairly substantial papyri of a play called Inicus, which some people think may have been a satyr drama, but that's sometimes under debate. And then we have lots of other little snippets. Sometimes it can actually be very difficult to distinguish just from a set of fragments what genre the play is.

And this, again, is where some kinds of assumptions often come into play. kinds of assumptions often come into play. So if the fragment contains anything to do with sex or wine, in the past there's been a critical tradition to assume that that must be a satyr drama or food or banqueting because those are seen as very light, jovial, satiric themes. But if all you have is a one-word fragment mentioning a banquet, really that could come from any kind of play. There are some plays which we know are definitely satiric and then we have others where it's not certain in some cases. Before we go on focusing on some of these fragments in particular, just a few questions beforehand because you mentioned the papyri just there, which begs the question,

where do we really find these fragments? In what form? Yeah, that's a really good question. So I think when people think about a fragment, we often tend to think quite literally that it is a piece broken off from an original whole. So most people probably think that these are actual physical papyri and parchment. And that's certainly the case for some dramas. But actually, by far, the more common type of fragment is what we call a book fragment. And that's a piece of the play that has been preserved in another author. So that could be really any kind of author from the ancient world. One particularly common source of these are ancient

lexica, so ancient dictionaries, essentially. So they might say, you know, in this play by Sophocles, he uses this rare word and then they give the word and that would count as a fragment because that that is the piece of that play that has been preserved we also get much longer pieces quoted so um Athenaeus who writes a really long work called the Dapenus Sophisti or the kind of educated people having dinner together um he's very learned vanquishers, quoting tons of bits of dramas at each other. And that's a great source for us because that preserves much longer fragments. So that's actually the more common type of fragment, a deliberate quotation by another

author from some period in antiquity, which could be fairly contemporary, or it could be much, much later. I mean, we also get sources from, you know, the 10th century AD, so very far removed in time. And that's by far more common than the papyri. So it's a mixture of literature and archaeology, but the literature from what you're saying is more prevalent. Yeah, so there's more of it, but each kind presents different kinds of challenges. So the papyri often tend to be much longer, right? So it can mutate, we have hundreds of lines of because that is a physical papyrus that was preserved in the sands of Egypt. So even though it has holes in it, we do get a really good sense of

the progression of quite a lot of a central scene of that drama. So even though there may be fewer papyri, those fragments are often longer and more informative because we have whole scenes preserved in some form. With the book fragments, there's many, many more of them, but often they're really short. So a lot of them, when you look at Sophocles, are actually just one word, right, because they are preserved in ancient dictionaries, or very short, maybe two words or a sentence, or at most a couple of lines so even though in terms of the quantity of words there may be more of them we can often do a bit less of them because the context is more challenging i mean let's focus on a few of the examples now and i know you want to focus on three and i think

you mentioned one just now that very long satire play, Forgive Me, I Cannot for the Life of Me Say the Name of It. The Ich Nutai, or you can also call it The Trackers, which is what that means. Okay. Yeah, so what does the fragment about The Trackers tell us? Okay, so this is a satire drama that's based, again, on an ancient myth. And this tells a story which is also told in the Homeric hymn to Hermes which is how the god Hermes when he was an infant, he'd really just been born, committed this really amazing feat of actually stealing the cattle of Apollo. He then uses the stolen cattle to create the first lyre so it's about the invention of this particular instrument. So in the Ichnitai, as I said earlier, Sophocles has taken this well-known story and just dropped the satyrs into it.

So the satyrs are kind of engaged by Apollo to go and look for his cattle. So they track this to the cave where Hermes is inside. And then they hear the noise of this newly invented musical instrument emanating from it and they're completely kind of overcome by this and terrified so we don't have all the play we have a kind of substantial chunk of it and that's the the story that that it's essentially telling but what does this once again does this really emphasize how they're dropping this more light-hearted mythical creature into a well-known mythical story. Yeah, and that's the way the genre seems to have worked. The best example, because it's our only

fully surviving satyr drama, is actually one by Euripides called The Cyclops, which tells the very well-known story that we know of from The Odyssey, where Odysseus ends up on the island of the Cyclops and is imprisoned in his cave and then has to blind him and escape. And what Euripides does in Cyclops is exactly the same as what we find here. So in that play, Odysseus turns up on the island and says, you know, why are there all these satyrs here? What are they doing? So the satyrs, again, have been inserted into a story that traditionally they don't belong to and then of course they complicate it, they cause havoc but by the end the story ends as we think it should

and that seems to have been a fairly typical kind of template for these dramas. Again sometimes it's a bit dangerous to make generalisations because we have so few of these but we think that seems to have been a fairly common way of creating the plots of these dramas. It sounds like you say they put the satyrs in the middle of the play as it were but even though they may create chaos confusion a bit of light-heartedness back in those times of course not today but at the end of the play it doesn't seem to affect the outcome that they're expecting. Yes I think that is correct, that by the end, the myth is kind of back in its proper place. So you have the story, you think you

know how it's going to end, the satyrs turn up, try and cause as much havoc as possible, but they never quite manage to completely overturn it. So one pattern that we often find when the story involves, you know, a young girl or nymph is that the satyrs make quite aggressive sexual advances towards that person or they compete to try and win the hand of someone. Obviously, if they actually succeeded in that, that would be unthinkable, right, in terms of the way that that myth would then develop. It's almost like, you know, science fiction thinking how that story could go off in a different direction. And so the satyrs always fail. They never reach their objective. They never manage to take on that heroic role, that role of the divine lover.

So I think one expectation of the genre must have been that it would end as we were expecting. But part of the fun of it is seeing how we get there, how almost despite what the satyrs are doing, the story ends in a way that we think it should. So coming back to Euripides' Cyclops, you know, it was never going to end with the Cyclops eating Odysseus, right? But again, that's unthinkable in terms of mythical tradition. We know it's going to end with Odysseus overcoming him and leaving the island. So it never quite manages to completely overturn our expectations

for the myth. And going on to tragedy now, what examples do we have of tragedy plays by Sophocles that we know of from the fragments? What examples? Yeah, well, tons. So as I said earlier, we think he wrote over 120 plays, possibly 123 is a number that we can very often come to if we combine different sources. And if you look at the fragments, which sometimes are as brief as just an attested title, we can more or less make it up to that number. So we actually have a fairly good idea of probably the titles of almost all of what Sophocles wrote. Again, sometimes it's a bit unclear because a play might have two different titles and so there might be some doubling up going on. But if we look at the fragments, we actually get, I think, a fairly good overview of all of his work in terms of the subject matter and the titles.

Then within that, some of those plays are very poorly represented. So as I said, it might just literally be the title, or it might just be a few words or a few fragments. Very often, because we know the title, we can kind of make very broad assumptions about what might have happened in it, because these figures are so well known. So if you have a play about, you know, Iphigenia, you can be fairly certain it's about her sacrifice. We can often map the stories onto these figures. But then there are a couple of plays like the Ichnutai and like some other tragedies where we do have much more substantial text. And then we can start to do a little bit more with that and to try and figure out not just what story was treated, but how it was treated. What were

these characters like? What themes did they raise? What unusual things happened in it? How would it change the way that we think about tragedy if we took these plays a little bit more seriously? And which particular tragedies did you have in mind? Yeah, so I wanted to kind of share with you a couple. One is, the first one is a play that I've been thinking about for a number of years now. it's called The Tyrius. And this tells a story that is fairly well known from later ancient sources. So it's probably best known now because Ovid also writes about it in the Metamorphoses. But Sophocles wrote a tragedy called Tyrius, which is about two sisters, daughters of the King of Athens, they're called Procne and Philomela. Procne is married to Tyrius, which is about two sisters, daughters of the king of Athens, they're called Procne and

Philomela. Procne is married to Tyreus, the king of Thrace, so she goes off to Thrace to live with him, and they have a child, a son. She misses her sister, so she asks Tyreus to fetch her for a visit, but on the way, Tyreus actually rapes Philomela and then mutilates her by cutting out her tongue so that she can't tell anyone what's happened. So it's a really horrific myth. It's incredibly violent. But when Philomela arrives in Thrace, somehow, and we're not told exactly how, which is a bit frustrating, she weaves a story of what's happened and gives this to her sister. weaves a story of what's happened and gives this to her sister. She obviously can't speak anymore, so she represents it through weaving. And the sisters reunite, and then Procne takes revenge by killing her and Tyrius's own son and cooking him and serving him up to his own father.

And then after that, Tyrius realises what's happened or is told what's happened and chases the women to try and exact revenge and then the gods turn all three of them into birds. So I mean this is just a completely fantastic story, you know, it's violent, it's gory but it's also so fascinating. It's about female solidarity, it's about violence, it's about revenge and we know all of that because the story is attested widely in other sources. But Sophocles also treated it in this tragedy, for which we actually have quite a few fragments. And these are essentially book fragments, so fragments that are preserved in other authors. But then a really exciting thing happened a few years ago. So in 2016, a new fragment of this, a papyrus fragment, was published. And this fragment is part

of the Oxyrhynchus collection. So this is a collection of papyri housed in Oxford that actually was discovered over 100 years ago now, but it takes a lot of time to work through and identify and publish these. And this was recognised as being from the Tyrius because the beginning of it overlapped directly with the end of a fragment that we previously knew about, a book fragment which is securely attributed to that play. So this is immensely exciting because suddenly we know what happens next in that scene. We have a brand new piece of text by Sophocles that only was discovered four years ago. So I think there's often a preconception that there's nothing new in the ancient world, we've got all our material, nothing new is going to emerge, but often that's simply not true and this discovery shows that.

It's really exciting to hear, especially with these fragments, how we are finding more and more even in the 21st century. Yeah, absolutely. I think that this especially is a kind of really exciting discovery. When you actually look at the Neapapyrus fragment in itself, it actually doesn't look that impressive because it's quite heavily mucilated. And we don't have full lines, we only have kind of bits of lines. But actually, scholars have been using it to think through the implications of how it links on to that scene that we already knew about. So it follows directly on from quite a famous, quite to that scene that we already knew about. So it follows directly

on from quite a famous, quite a beautiful fragment that we knew about previously, in which a speaker, a female speaker, talks about how marriage is a really miserable condition for women. And she says, you know, of all the creatures that live, we women are the most unfortunate because we have to get married, we're pushed away from our home, we're sold, we're sent to homes which are abusive. And the new papyrus fragment links on to the end of that. And it shows that shortly after this, a new character enters that we didn't know about previously, who is a shepherd. And when we look at tragedy, shepherds always enter on stage because they're bringing some kind of muse right their job means that they're out in the countryside they see things

happening and then they come into the city and they tell people things that have happened so we can now start to think a bit more creatively about where that scene might have fitted in the play as a whole it also seems to confirm that the character who's speaking is Procne, the wife of Tyrius, because of the way that the chorus addressed her. So suddenly this new piece of text, even though in itself looks fairly unprepossessing, it unlocks the whole load of new questions that we can ask about the fragment that we already knew of. Brilliant. It just further shows how ancient history is not dead and we're learning so much more about it every day it's like adding pieces of a puzzle together it's absolutely fantastic i love that yeah no it's really exciting and i think it's a good way of reminding us of kind of unsettling those assumptions that we had tragedy is such a well-known genre and so we think we know what it

means but these new discoveries can unsettle that and make us think about it again so let's have a talk about the other tragedy from the fragments that I know you mentioned earlier before we started, the Niobe. What do we know about this? The story here, again, fairly well known from other mythical sources, is Niobe, who very foolishly boasts that she has more children than the mother of the gods Apollo and Artemis. She says she's better than her because she's been more fertile. And so, of course, retribution follows fairly swiftly and her children are killed by those two gods, by Apollo and Artemis. And we have a fragment of the play in which Apollo

says, presumably to his sister, to Artemis, can you see that one hiding inside? Won't you shoot an arrow at her as quickly as possible? So again, unfortunately, this is another really violent story. But this is really fascinating because the immediacy of those lines saying, won't you aim an arrow at her before she can hide out of sight, that seems to suggest something potentially quite new about the representation of violence on stage in Greek tragedy. So it's kind of a truism, people often say there's no violence on stage in Greek drama, instead it's off stage, it's reported. But what seems to be happening here is that we have these two gods appearing on stage inciting each other to murder the daughters of Niobe, who perhaps are on stage, but perhaps more likely are kind of inside

the building. So we don't actually see them, but we see the gods there shooting at them and killing them. And then there's a later fragment as well, where one of the daughters of Niobe says, do not shoot an arrow at me. So there seems to have been some kind of extremely exciting, but also violent and terrifying scene in which these two gods were kind of in front of the spectator's eyes, killing the children of Niobe. And so this is another fascinating moment where the fragments can make us think in new ways about what was possible on the ancient stage. If we just looked at the plays that survive, we have nothing like this, right? There's nothing kind of comparable to the energy of the particular kind of violence that we find here of two gods actually in front of the spectator's eyes committing these

acts. So I think this is a really nice example of how, once again, taking the fragments into account can perhaps challenge some of our preconceptions of what tragedy could do, what its limitations were. So in regards to the fragments, they don't just tell us more about Sophocles himself and the sort of plays that he created it can also tell us more about the structure of the Athenian dramatic stage or the classical Greek dramatic stage as a whole. Absolutely yeah and we do have this very distorted view that comes from just looking at the plays that have survived. Another example this isn'tocles, but one other thing that's very preconception that was often thought about Greek tragedy

was that it tends to not change location all that much, that it tends to be set in one place. I mean, actually, if you look, even the surviving plays, that's not always true, right? We have plays which do change location, but we know of a play by Aeschylus, which is reported to have had, I think it's five different scene changes. So that is beyond the realms of anything we would have thought possible if we just looked at the plays that survive.

So it may well be that a lot of the ideas that we've developed about the constraints of tragedy are purely based on this very small sample of what was originally an incredibly diverse and rich and exciting and often quite boundary-pushing field, but it happens that the plays that have survived don't necessarily represent everything that the stage was capable of. Well, from what you're saying then, it sounds very much like the fragments are a key source for understanding the style and the poetic, well, the poetic and the dramatic style of Sophocles and also so much more. Yeah, I think so. I think they're absolutely fascinating. There's so much material. There's so much exciting work being done on it now. And I think scholars are increasingly realising

what we can do with this material goes beyond trying to just work out what happened in the play, right, taking the fragments and trying to put them into an order and saying, then this happened, and then this character did this. But actually thinking, how can we use this material to think through the kinds of big questions that we use texts like the Oedipus and the Antigone to think through. Of course, in some cases, that's extremely challenging when you only have a couple of words, you probably can't really do that with the play. But when you have more substantial pieces, I think there are new questions that we can ask. And it also challenges us as scholars to rethink some of

the assumptions that we've been working with. Why is it that we are so interested, for example, in Sophocles in thinking about the Sophoclean hero? Because when we look at the fragmentary clues, we don't really see many traces of that kind of figure. He actually wrote about all different kinds of characters who don't always follow that pattern of behaviour. So there's a good example of the way that a very strong tradition of thinking about Sophocles has been dictated by a tiny sample that might actually be quite unrepresentative of the original whole. Yes, it sounds like we can learn just as much, if not more, from the fragments than we do the actual complete plays. As long as we're careful, yeah, and cautious. And sometimes it's a bit frustrating. But yeah, I think there's much more to be done. Absolutely. And just just to finish off because I know that you've written about it recently

one of these topics on the fragments the portrayal of women. Yeah that's right so I was looking actually at the Tyrius which we were talking about earlier which to me is so fascinating because it shows a relationship between sisters and that's a relationship that often we don't tend to think about in tragedy so we very often think about parent-child relationships, or when it comes to siblings, we think about sister and brother. So a very famous example of that in tragedy is Orestes and Electra, who have a long tradition, a long scholarly history of being interrogated as an exemplar of sister-brother relationships. But the relationship between two women, between two sisters, is one that actually very rarely gets much attention. And when it does, it's often a bit dismissive. So it looks, for example, at Antigone and her sister Ismene in the Antigone and says, oh, they're just different, they contrast and that's all there is to it. But in Turius, we get this really fascinating story where actually the bond of sisterhood is right at the centre of it. Procne takes revenge for her

sister. She acts with her and they work together. There's a collaboration between the two of them, even though one of them is silent, she's been horribly mutilated, she's had her tongue cut off, the other is active, she kills her own son in order to avenge this terrible thing that has been done to her sister. So it's really powerful as an exploration of that relationship. And this goes back to the point we made right at the beginning about the ways that these texts can also speak in new ways to contemporary concerns. This is also a really powerful myth for contemporary feminist thought as well. We can use it in ways that Sophocles would never have dreamed of, right? I think by using this story for thinking through the implications of female solidarity, of sisters

acting together, of, you know, what happens when the revenge they take is actually itself really horrific and really violent. So I think it's incredibly important text in all kinds of ways. Absolutely right. And I think that's a great way to finish, linking back to the start right there. And Lindsay, the title of this book is called? Oh, so this is a co-edited volume that I've recently published with my colleague, Professor Patrick Finglass, called Female Characters in Fragmentary Greek Tragedy, which does exactly what it says in the title. It's a collection of fantastic essays looking at all different kinds of important female characters

from the tragedies. So it's asking, if we didn't have Antigone, Medea, Electra, and instead we had these other female characters, what would the study of tragedy look like? Thank you so much for coming on the show. No, it's been a pleasure. Thank you.