II. The lost plays of Euripides: textual evidence

Two distinct but related Lives of Euripides transmitted in the medieval manuscripts of his plays preserve detailed information on the numerical consistency of his oeuvre.Footnote ² In one version, both the total number of his plays (92) and the number of extant plays (78) are provided, with the additional indication that three were deemed spurious, namely Tennes, Rhadamanthys and Pirithous.Footnote ³ Another version breaks down the number of extant plays by genre and authenticity, listing 67 genuine tragedies and three disputed ones, as well as eight satyr plays (the Life mentions one case of debated authenticity for this genre as well).Footnote ⁴

It is most likely that these numbers originate in third-century BC Alexandria. A concern with the number, authenticity and survival of fifth-century plays is explicitly connected to Aristophanes of Byzantium in other sources. First, the Life of Sophocles preserves similar numerical information about Sophocles’ plays and traces it to the authority of this scholar.Footnote ⁵ Second, in listing the plays of the Euripidean tetralogy of 431 BC, the hypothesis of Medea ascribed to Aristophanes appends the words οὐ σῴζεται (‘it is not extant’) to the fourth title, the satyr play Θερισταί (Harvesters), about which nothing else is known.Footnote ⁶ Aristophanes is likely to have drawn these data from Callimachus’ Pinakes.Footnote ⁷

Alexandrian grammarians are well known for their concern with establishing authors’ corpora, in keeping with the Ptolemies’ book-acquisition policies.Footnote ⁸ Although the surviving numbers of the Alexandrian library holdings may be inflated, and statements that this or that Ptolemy aimed to collect ‘all the books in the world’ are certainly hyperbolic,Footnote ⁹ acquiring everything Euripides wrote was both a realistic project and one that was pursued and almost fulfilled by Alexandrian scholars: the very existence of a sizeable Euripidean corpus throughout antiquity is the most eloquent evidence. On these grounds, there can be little doubt that the numbers preserved in the Lives are Alexandrian, and that the verb σῴζω in these passages indicates survival into the Hellenistic period.

Thus, the Lives ultimately indicate that as many as 14 of Euripides’ plays disappeared between the playwright’s lifetime and the years in which a corpus of Euripidean plays was collected in Alexandria, where the data that survive today were compiled. But which plays were lost? This paper contends that they were satyr plays. As mentioned above, one of the lost plays was the satyr drama of the Medea tetralogy. A similar piece of information may be gleaned from another hypothesis by Aristophanes of Byzantium, although the text is lacunose. Prefixed to the Phoenissae is the following (hyp. (g) Eur. Phoen. pp. 80–81 Diggle):Footnote ¹⁰

These lines are the remnants of what must originally have been a full didascalic section detailing the date and outcome of the performance, the names of the competitors and the titles of the plays Euripides staged in the competition, followed, as usual, by the composition of the chorus and the identity of the prologue-speaker. The only clear piece of information in the extant portion of the didascalia is that Euripides placed second, but the close proximity of the word σῴζεται is a good indication that one of the companion plays to Phoenissae, likely the last in the list, was no longer available, assuming that an original οὐ σῴζεται was once appended to a now-lost title, as it is to the title Harvesters in the Medea hypothesis. If this assumption is correct, this fragmentary hypothesis also provides an important chronological indication: Phoenissae was a late play (probably performed around 408), which means that the lost plays were not confined to Euripides’ earlier production. It is unclear in what capacity Chrysippus and Oenomaus figure in this lacunose hypothesis, but several scholars have seen these plays as the companion tragedies to Phoenissae, which would confirm that the lost one was a satyr play.Footnote ¹¹

Another Euripidean play that seems never to have reached Alexandria is Lamia. Of this play we know the title, two lines quoted by Diodorus of Sicily (probably the first two of the prologue) and the fact, reported in a section of Lactantius based on Varro, that its prologue mentioned a Libyan sibyl.Footnote ¹² Lamia does not appear in ancient catalogues or collections of hypotheses; a second-century AD alphabetical list of Euripidean plays covers the relevant part of the alphabet but does not list Lamia.Footnote ¹³ As has been convincingly established on the grounds of literary and iconographical sources, it was most likely a satyr play, one that was lost before it could reach the Alexandrian library.Footnote ¹⁴

III. Lost plays and Euripidean performances: numerical evidence

If two or three lost satyr plays do not make a trend, cross-checking the numerical data found in the Lives with those on Euripides’ productions yields further results. The extant plays included as many as 70 tragedies out of a total of 92 plays. No information is given about the genre of the non-extant plays, but applying the fifth-century BC tetralogic pattern of the Great DionysiaFootnote ¹⁵ to this total gives an interesting result: 92 plays correspond to 23 tetralogies, and 23 ‘pure’ tetralogies of three tragedies + one satyr play correspond to 69 tragedies. We know of one all-tragic tetralogy, namely the production that included Alcestis as ‘prosatyric’ in 438 (hyp. Eur. Alc. 16–18 Diggle). If this was a unique exception, as Marshall has convincingly argued, we could conclude that Euripides produced a total of 70 tragedies, and that all of his tragedies were extant in Alexandria.Footnote ¹⁶ This conclusion would exclude the possibility that Euripides competed at the Lenaea (the other option for tragic premieres from the decade 440–430), because in the fifth century this festival featured tragic competitions with entries of just two tragedies per competitor. All the extant didascalic material for Euripides points to Dionysiac agōnes, and various arguments have been proposed against his participation in the Lenaea. A comedy-dominated environment, a less prestigious and less cosmopolitan venue have all been posited as reasons for this festival having little appeal for Euripides.Footnote ¹⁷ For other minor venues, such as the Rural Dionysia, our meagre evidence points to (authorial) reperformances rather than premieres.Footnote ¹⁸

More importantly, another biographical source, the Suda, reports that Euripides produced plays in 22 annual dramatic competitions, and that a 23rd production was entrusted to his nephew after his death.Footnote ¹⁹ Given that this source is aware of the posthumous performance and also reports the number of victories (an underwhelming five), it is likely that these data are of didascalic origin rather than resulting from mere calculation (that is, division by four of the total 92). The evidence, then, strongly suggests (1) that Euripides competed with 23 tetralogies, which gives a total of 70 tragedies (with the all-tragic tetralogy of 438); (2) that all of his tragedies were extant in Alexandria (notably, the titles of all 70 of these tragedies are still known to us); and (3) that his 14 lost plays were exclusively satyr plays.

Four possible complications to this numerical reconstruction should be mentioned.

1. (1) Andromache. According to a scholium on Euripides’ Andromache, the play was not performed in Athens.Footnote ²⁰ The scholium discusses the play’s political stance and its date in tandem, adducing the fact that the play was not performed in Athens as the reason why it cannot be precisely dated. The underlying reasoning is clearly that, had it been performed in Athens, its date would have been recorded in the Didascaliae. However, in the same connection, the scholium also mentions Callimachus’ statement that ‘the name of Democrates was attached to the tragedy’ (ἐπιγραφῆναι … τῇ τραγῳδίᾳ Δημοκράτην). This statement only makes sense in its immediate context if it is related to the dating issue, and the most likely explanation is that it is meant to correct the previous statement: a Euripidean performance of Andromache could not be found in the Didascaliae because the name of Democrates rather than Euripides was attached to the play (qua didaskalos).Footnote ²¹ Therefore, the scholium probably provides evidence not of a non-Athenian production of Andromache, but of an Athenian performance of Andromache (and its companion plays) entrusted to Democrates, which simply made the play harder to locate in didascalic records.Footnote ²²

2. (2) Archelaus. A non-Athenian production has also been assumed for Archelaus. According to a well-established ancient tradition, the play was commissioned by the homonymous Macedonian king, at whose court Euripides allegedly spent the final years of his life.Footnote ²³ However, the sources on the composition of Archelaus do not state that Euripides staged the play only in Macedon and never in Athens. Conversely, Aristophanes’ Frogs quotes a Euripidean incipit that was identified with that of Archelaus by pre-Aristarchean sources.Footnote ²⁴ This presupposes the Athenian audience’s familiarity with the play and thus an Athenian performance of it.

3. (3) The posthumous plays. A scholium on Aristophanes’ Frogs ascribes to the Didascaliae the statement that after Euripides’ death, his homonymous son produced the plays Iphigenia in Aulis, Alcmaeon and Bacchae at the City Dionysia.Footnote ²⁵ It is possible that the younger Euripides exceptionally took part in the usually tetralogic competition with just the three tragedies, but it is far more likely that the scholium simply fails to mention the accompanying satyr play (perhaps not even an extant drama).Footnote ²⁶ The only other apparent instance of an incomplete tetralogy in the fifth century is likely to stem from textual corruption: in recording Aristias’ participation in the 467 BC contest, the hypothesis of Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes lists only Perseus, Tantalus and the satyr play Palaistai, but because the other two competitors staged tetralogies, it is reasonable to assume that a fourth title is missing from the hypothesis.Footnote ²⁷

4. (4) Spurious plays. The first Life mentions three tragedies of disputed authorship within the Euripidean corpus (Rhadamanthys, Pirithous and Tennes); the second adds a single unnamed satyr play of disputed authorship, which modern scholars usually identify with Sisyphus.Footnote ²⁸ Plays with these titles can be counted among the Euripidean tetralogies only if it is assumed that (allegedly) spurious texts replaced the texts of homonymous plays that Euripides had staged. Sisyphus, which was part of Euripides’ 415 BC tetralogy with Troades, Alexander and Palamedes (Ael. VH 2.8), would belong in this category, as does Rhesus: a Euripidean play with this title was recorded in the Didascaliae, but the authenticity of the transmitted text was already in doubt in antiquity (hyp. (b) Rhes. 23–44 Diggle). This suggests that a play titled Rhesus was staged by Euripides but was replaced with a non-Euripidean play in the course of transmission.Footnote ²⁹ One could object that Rhadamanthys, Pirithous and Tennes might have been deemed spurious precisely because their titles did not appear in the Didascaliae, but the fact that a play could not be found in the Didascaliae did not normally prompt such a conclusion in antiquity; rather, the conclusion was that it was never staged or not staged in Athens.Footnote ³⁰

Ultimately, then, it seems plausible that the ‘23 tetralogies thesis’ is a good reflection of Euripides’ output, and that the 70 tragedies known to the Alexandrians were all the tragedies Euripides ever staged (although a few of these texts may have been inauthentic replacements of lost Euripidean texts).

IV. Establishing a corpus: Lycurgus and the Ptolemies

As shown in section II, the loss of 14 Euripidean plays must have occurred in pre-Alexandrian times. This section discusses the loss of these plays first in relation to a crucial moment in the pre-Hellenistic transmission of Attic tragedy, namely, the creation of an Athenian Staatsexemplar of the texts of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides in the second half of the fourth century BC, and then in relation to the accession of tragic corpora to the Alexandrian library under the Ptolemies.

Around the year 330 BC, the Athenian statesman Lycurgus introduced a law establishing that an official copy of the three canonical tragedians’ plays be made and kept in the public archive. It was to be read by the grammateus to whoever wished to stage the plays, to ensure that the performances conformed to those texts. The Life of the Ten Orators ascribed to Plutarch, our only source on the matter, reports the contents of this nomos in a list of measures undertaken by Lycurgus in relation to theatrical matters (Mor. 841f):Footnote ³¹

The stated purpose of this initiative was to limit the alteration of the texts in performance (primarily in performances at the Great Dionysia).Footnote ³² The procedure envisioned includes features that are typical of legislative and administrative procedures, one of which is the involvement of the grammateus, who in fourth-century oratory is entrusted with reading official texts to the assembly. The very idea of ‘reading out for comparison’ (παραναγινώσκειν) could, moreover, be applied to laws and decrees: in indictments for illegal decrees, the decree and the laws it allegedly violated were set out on a tablet to be read side by side to verify the conformity of the former to the latter, the law being a virtually immutable text that had to be followed.Footnote ³³ Thus, while it would be anachronistic to see in Lycurgus’ initiative a truly philological enterprise based on the collation of different manuscripts, it can still be understood as an attempt to establish an authoritative, authentic and normative text.Footnote ³⁴

In addition to textual stabilization, one clear effect of this decree was textual preservation. Once in the state archive, a text could hardly become lost. Its preservation was guaranteed, safe from the haphazard dynamics of the book trade and audience taste, as long as the archive endured. It is also unlikely that plays included in the Lycurgan archive would not have reached the Alexandrian library. We do not know when the texts of the three tragedians first reached Alexandria, but scholarly work on tragedy and satyr drama was already underway during the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, when Alexander of Aetolia prepared the first diorthōsis and Callimachus compiled his Pinakes: the former, at least, would have required substantial textual availability.Footnote ³⁵ The subsequent work of Aristophanes of Byzantium (ca. 257–180) presupposes the establishment of full tragic corpora.

The foundation of the Library (probably) under Philadelphus and its subsequent expansion undoubtedly came with vigorous acquisition policies. Galen records how Ptolemy III Euergetes, one hundred years after Lycurgus’ decree, appropriated the Athenian copies of the three tragedians’ works (In Hippocratis de Morbis Vulgaribus 17a.607.4–14 Kühn):Footnote ³⁶

Galen does not specifically mention Lycurgus, but he makes clear that he is referring to authoritative and ancient Athenian copies of the three tragedians’ works, which are moreover public copies, because the Athenians are spoken of as a collective entity throughout the passage; so there can be no doubt that this Athenian exemplar was the Lycurgan exemplar. The story is used to illustrate Ptolemy’s unscrupulous bibliomania and indeed offers an almost caricatural portrayal of the king; nonetheless, there is no reason to discount it entirely.Footnote ³⁷

First, it is highly likely that the Lycurgan copies existed through the third century BC. The time interval between Lycurgus and Ptolemy III is within the typical life cycle of a papyrus roll in antiquity, and well within it if we consider the importance of the copies and the archival preservation they enjoyed. In AD 79, the private library of the Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum held several books from the second and even third century BC.Footnote ³⁸ By the time of Ptolemy III, the Lycurgan texts would have been ancient and venerable, but still readable books.

Second, there is no reason to doubt that the Ptolemies tried to obtain the Lycurgan texts, or at least make copies from them. Without an energetic acquisition policy, Alexandrian scholars could not have consulted different copies of Rhesus and commented on two different prologues of the play, or compared different editions of Homer.Footnote ³⁹ Moreover, Galen’s account of the Athenian manuscripts occurs in a discussion that presupposes a detailed knowledge of the Alexandrian library. At this point of his commentary, Galen is discussing the special characters added to medical cases in copies of Hippocrates’ Epidemics. Galen ascribes the addition of these characters to a certain Mnemon, a physician from Pamphylia, and relates that they were found in a specific Alexandrian copy of the Epidemics, of which he reports the subscriptio: τῶν ἐκ πλοίων κατὰ διορθωτὴν Μνήμονα Σιδήτην (‘of those from the ships, as emended by Mnemon of Side’, In Hippocratis de Morbis Vulgaribus 17a605.10–607.4). Galen is able to explain that the label ἐκ πλοίων was assigned to books that were accessioned into the library from overseas, brought in on ships docking at the harbour of Alexandria to satisfy Ptolemy’s thirst for books. Regardless of the exact circumstances of their acquisition, it is hard to doubt that manuscripts marked as ‘books from the ships’ did exist. That there were manuscripts ‘from the ships’ does not need to mean that Ptolemy got them violently or by subterfuge, but it does mean that there was a notable inflow of books from abroad that reached Alexandria by sea, either to be copied or directly added to the library’s collections. Galen even mentions storehouses where books were kept before being transferred to the library, suggesting that his sources were familiar with the dynamics of acquisition (17a607.2–4).Footnote ⁴⁰

Galen’s account does not imply that the Lycurgan copies were the first or the only copies of the three tragedians’ works to reach Alexandria: they certainly were not. Nor do we need to postulate a ‘philological line’, a preference for the Athenian text over other copies. Rather, the point is that once we accept that the Lycurgan exemplar, or a copy of it, reached Alexandria, we must also accept that the plays that never reached Alexandria were not part of the Lycurgan exemplar. Even if we discount the anecdote altogether, the way Ptolemaic acquisition politics enabled editorial and philological work on tragedy in third-century Alexandria makes it inherently implausible that textual availability in late fourth-century Athens, as guaranteed by the Lycurgan copy, would not translate into textual availability in Ptolemaic Alexandria. It is then extremely unlikely that dramatic texts which the Alexandrian scholars marked as non-extant were part of the Lycurgan corpus.

Why, then, were 14 of Euripides’ plays not part of the Lycurgan exemplar? There are essentially two possible explanations: either all 14 were already lost before the creation of the Lycurgan exemplar, or some or all of them were still extant at that time but were left out of it for some reason. If all 14 were already lost by 330, they must have disappeared from circulation relatively early: perhaps some were never kept in durable textual form or were even intentionally discarded. Conversely, if they were left out of the Lycurgan exemplar for some reason, there would be 14 ‘non-Lycurgan’ plays that disappeared gradually over the century and a half between the death of Euripides and the acme of Ptolemaic book acquisition. But for what reasons could any play extant around 330 have been left out of the Lycurgan archive?

The practical goal of the Lycurgan copy, as reported in the Lives of the Ten Orators, was to ensure that revivals of the plays used an authorized text, so as to protect the tragedians’ texts from performance-based alterations. The measure must then be related to the practice of reviving ‘old tragedies’ at the Great Dionysia that started in 386 BC.Footnote ⁴¹ The extant records of dramatic competitions mentioning revivals in the course of the fourth century BC are very fragmentary, but records of the Great Dionysia of the years 341 to 339 still exist, in chronological proximity to Lycurgus’ decree.Footnote ⁴² In these records, one satyr play appears as a single initial performance, non-competitive and original (that is, the satyr play is not a παλαιὸν δρᾶμα). It is followed by the performance of a single παλαιὰ τραγῳδία, for which the inscription gives the title and author (incidentally, the author is Euripides in each of these three years). Next comes the competition of three tragedians with three (in 341) or two (in 340) new tragedies and no satyr play. It therefore appears that as early as (at least) 341, satyr drama was relegated to a single opening event, whereas revivals were limited to tragedy: indeed, the formula that introduces the revival is a simple feminine dative, παλαιᾷ.Footnote ⁴³ Our documentation is fragmentary and incomplete, but the chronological proximity of these records to Lycurgus’ decree makes these programmes particularly relevant to the present discussion.Footnote ⁴⁴ If the practice of reviving plays in Lycurgus’ time excluded satyr drama, his decree would not have required archival copies of satyr plays, only of tragedies. The absence of satyr plays from the Lycurgan exemplar may in turn explain why the Alexandrians could acquire only a subset of Euripides’ satyr plays: while the tragedies had been safely kept in the Athenian archive, the survival of satyr plays was more casual, and so about two-thirds of Euripides’ satyr plays gradually disappeared, leaving no or little trace, in the well over a hundred years between Euripides and the establishment of the Alexandrian canon.

V. Limbo: Lamia in the fourth century BC

Further confirmation of this scenario is offered by Lamia. As discussed in section II, we know of this play from Diodorus of Sicily and Varro apud Lactantius. Can this be a resurfacing of a very rare play during the first century BC? It seems highly unlikely. Both Varro and Diodorus often report second-hand information and quotations, and it is more plausible that their references to Euripides’ Lamia are a ‘fossil’ that is ultimately traceable to pre-Alexandrian times. Trying to pin down the exact source may seem a vain (and old-fashioned) enterprise. However, both references have been independently traced to sources of the fourth and early third century BC.

The reference to Lamia in Lactantius is part of his treatment of the sibyls. While the fifth century knew only one sibyl, over time several distinct sibyls were identified, and the Lactantius passage reports their names and provenance, often naming a source. The prologue of Euripides’ Lamia is adduced as the source for the sibyl of Libya: secundam Libyssam, cuius meminerit Euripides in Lamiae prologo (Div. inst. 1.6.8). The passage is based on Varro’s Antiquitates rerum diuinarum, which is explicitly mentioned at the beginning of the relevant section (fr. 56a Cardauns).

It is widely recognized that the first scholar to distinguish several sibyls was Heraclides of Pontus.Footnote ⁴⁵ An Athens-based scholar born around 390 and connected to Plato’s Academy, he wrote a treatise on oracles that later authors credit with a discussion of multiple sibyls. He is indeed, once explicitly and probably at least once tacitly, a source on the sibyls included in Lactantius’ catalogue, as well as the explicit source on two sibyls in Clement of Alexandria (Heraclid. Pont. frr. 119–26 Schütrumpf). If Heraclides compiled the first full catalogue of sibyls, he is certainly a good candidate for the use of Euripides’ play as a source for the Libyan one, because, during his prolific career in Athens, he was among the first to write on Euripides and Sophocles and about ‘the three tragic poets’.Footnote ⁴⁶

Diodorus’ source for Lamia is, instead, the slightly later polymath Duris of Samos, to whom an overlapping discussion of this character is ascribed by Photius and the Suda.Footnote ⁴⁷ The entire context of the Diodorus passage can in fact be traced, in part, to Duris’ work on Agathocles of Syracuse’s Libyan expedition (ca. 310 BC).Footnote ⁴⁸ Duris, like Heraclides, was a prolific writer, and we know that he also wrote a treatise on Euripides and Sophocles (FGrH 76 F 29).

Both references to Euripides’ Lamia thus seem to be traces of the play’s circulation at a time when it could have been saved if it had been included in the Lycurgan exemplar. If it was never included, and was lost in the following century, it was, I argue, because it was a satyr play, and therefore not a candidate for revival, and hence archival preservation, in Lycurgus’ time.

VI. Aeschylus and Sophocles

We do not have the same volume, nor the detail, of information on the early survival of Aeschylus’ and Sophocles’ plays. Numerical information exists about their works, but there is no explicit reference in ancient sources to the non-survival of any of their plays. This may be taken as an indication that all their plays survived into the Hellenistic period, but it is more likely that such data became unavailable in the course of transmission, as is the case with the number of Sophocles’ satyr plays, which our sources do not provide. Given that, overall, their plays were less read, less copied and less quoted in antiquity than those of Euripides, we have no guarantee that everything that survived into the Hellenistic period has left traces in the existing documentation; conversely, some of the most poorly attested plays might as well have been οὐ σῳζόμενα like Euripides’ Lamia. Moreover, it is more difficult to securely identify satyr plays in the fragmentary corpora of Sophocles and Aeschylus than it is for Euripides. Despite these difficulties, it is worth attempting to verify whether the data we do have are compatible with the thesis of a satyr-less Lycurgan exemplar.

Sommerstein’s ‘sifted’ catalogue of known Aeschylean plays includes 78 titles, 20 of which he labels ‘satyric’ (11), ‘probably satyric’ (7) or ‘perhaps satyric’ (2).Footnote ⁴⁹ He therefore concludes that the satyric titles represent about a quarter of the total, while acknowledging that these figures might not reflect the entirety of Aeschylus’ production. This represents a good approximation of what we can piece together from our sources, but uncertainty remains. Sommerstein’s catalogue leaves out two tragic titles that other scholars accept, namely Bacchae, which he tentatively identifies with Bassarids, even though it is listed as a distinct title in the Medicean catalogue (Aesch. TrGF T 78), and Prometheus Pyrphoros, which he identifies with the satyr play Prometheus Pyrkaeus but might also be a distinct play.Footnote ⁵⁰ Moreover, the identification of Ixion, Nemea and Oreithyia as satyr plays rests on very tenuous grounds.Footnote ⁵¹ If the titles we have represent 80 plays of which 17 are satyr plays and 63 tragedies, and if the latter constitute the totality of Aeschylus’ tragic productions, this would translate into 21 tetralogies and a loss of only four satyr plays (less than 20%); with 20 satyric titles out of 80 plays, there would have been no loss of plays (or play titles). But it is hard to draw even tentative conclusions from these data, also because it is difficult to reconcile modern reconstructions of the Aeschylean corpus with the discordant and at times evidently unreliable numerical data preserved in our sources.Footnote ⁵²

For Sophocles, we know approximately 123 titles, of which 13 are certainly satyr plays and seven probably; and a few more satyric titles have been posited.Footnote ⁵³ Unless there are many more satyr plays undetected among the plays of which we are aware, this means that there is an excess in the number of tragedies. This may be accounted for in different ways: in principle, textual loss, non-tetralogical slates and all-tragic tetralogies are possible explanations and are not mutually exclusive.Footnote ⁵⁴ At any rate, if Sophocles did produce one satyr play for every three tragedies, and if all his tragedies survived into the Hellenistic period (the ca. 100 tragedies whose titles we know), the total number of his satyr plays would be approximately 100/3. Assuming, for instance, that 21 of the known fragmentary plays are satyric and that the remaining 102 known titles are tragedies, there would be 13 missing satyric titles. If these missing titles were ou sozomena, about 38 per cent of his satyr plays would have been lost. The percentage would be lower if we concede that Sophocles also took part in Lenaea contests. This has been posited to explain the different extant reports on the number of his victories, and might have (partial) epigraphic confirmation.Footnote ⁵⁵ Since the difference between the two reports on the number of Sophocles’ victories amounts to six, we may posit, say, 12 or 14 Lenaean tragedies, which would leave us with around 90 Dionysian tragedies and around 30 satyr plays, approximately ten of which would be οὐ σῳζόμενα.Footnote ⁵⁶

If the Lycurgan corpus did not include satyr plays, and the circulation and ultimate survival of the genre into the Hellenistic period was a matter of taste rather than of state intervention, the very few (if any) lost satyr plays of Aeschylus may be explained by the greater appreciation for his satyric production in antiquity, which is well documented.Footnote ⁵⁷ Regardless, even though the numbers are much more uncertain for Aeschylus and Sophocles, and for neither would the percentage of lost satyr plays be as high as for Euripides (64 per cent),Footnote ⁵⁸ the scant evidence we have is fully compatible with the thesis of a satyr-less Lycurgan exemplar.