Think of Greek tragedy and we tend to think of sad stories of the death of kings. Or, if not their deaths, then at least their comeuppances: Agamemnon killed in his bath by his wife; Ajax made mad and murderous by the gods; Oedipus blinded by his own hand; Jason destroyed after his wife, Medea, kills their children.

But only 32 complete plays survive, by just three playwrights – out of hundreds, or perhaps as many as 1,000 texts by around 80 authors. And, according to Matthew Wright, professor of Greek at the University of Exeter, the works we have by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides are neither necessarily the best plays of their time, nor especially representative. Some of these lost works, he believes, were likely to have been masterpieces: “There is no evidence that quality played a part in the transmission of the surviving texts.”

In one version, Medea was a kind of ​expert ​personal trainer who 'took on weak and feeble people'

According to his scrutiny of the remaining fragments, quotations and descriptions, the lost texts of fifth- and fourth-century BC Athenian plays display a vastly broader range of plot and tone than those that survive, with stories covering incest, sex, love, magic – and happy endings. Had more survived, we would have a “radically different” understanding of the nature of Greek tragedy as a genre.

Alexander the Great’s favourite play, for example, was decidedly jolly: in Euripides’s lost Andromeda, which told the story of the heroine’s rescue from death by the hero Perseus, the two marry. Another Euripides play, Protesilaus, about the first hero to be killed in the Trojan war, told of the dead man’s being brought back to life for a day because his wife loved him so much.

Aeschylus’s lost The Myrmidons also appeared to have had sexual and romantic love, between Achilles and Patroclus, at its heart. A physical relationship between the two heroes of the Trojan war is not spelled out in the main source for the story, Homer’s Iliad.

What if Oedipus didn’t blind himself? Ralph Fiennes in the National Theatre’s 2008 production. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

The fragments Wright has studied and analysed in his new book, The Lost Plays of Greek Tragedy, show that stories now often regarded as canonical myths were often highly inventive takes on basic storylines – and that there was no “authentic” version of the story of, say, Oedipus.

“I’m trying, in the book, to give a sense of the cauldron of stories and myths that tragedians were drawing on,” he said. “They were using the same basic stories, but reworking and rewriting them in completely different ways, so that audiences never really knew what they were going to get … All tragedy is ‘inauthentic’, in that the plays weren’t based on a fixed version of myths.”



For example, Wright believes he has identified “around 19 tragedies” that featured the heroine Medea – who, in the one surviving play about her, by Euripides, takes revenge on her faithless husband by killing their children. In a version by the playwright Carcinus, on the other hand, she sends the children away for safekeeping, and the fourth-century Diogenes of Sinope, best known for his founding of the school of Cynic philosophy, wrote a version in which her role as a sorceress was downplayed. Instead, she was a kind of personal trainer who “took on weak and feeble people, whose bodies had been ruined through overindulgence, and she made them strong and vigorous again through gymnastic exercises and steam baths”, according to a summary by the Byzantine anthologist, John of Stobi.

Diogenes was also the author of a shocking text, condemned by ancient critics, about Oedipus in which – unlike the version of the story that survives, by Sophocles – incest and parricide were defended. Euripides also wrote a play about Oedipus, in which the hero did not blind himself and, judging from the scraps and fragments studied by Wright, “put the erotic relationship between Oedipus and his wife Jocasta at the centre of the plot”.

From left, Luke Thompson, Lia Williams, Annie Fairbank and Jessica Brown Findlay in a 2015 production of Oresteia by Aeschylus Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

Among the most tantalising of the playwrights whose work has disappeared is Agathon – who appears as a character in both Plato’s philosophical dialogue The Symposium and Aristophanes’s comedy Thesmophoriazusae. Thirty-four fragments of his works remain, which convey, said Wright, “a Wildean wit – they are so beautiful, so elegant and so epigrammatic”. (In fact, he suspects Oscar Wilde, who studied classics, of having read fragments of Agathon – he certainly admired him, describing him as “this brilliant man of letters and of fashion in the wittiest period of Attic social life”.)

The winnowing-down of the corpus of Greek tragedy, said Wright, started in fourth-century Athens, with the politician Lycurgus establishing Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides as the “official” tragedians of the city state, with fixed texts deposited in the city archives and statues of the men erected in the theatre.

Nevertheless, other playwrights were read and valued through antiquity, but in the Byzantine period a few plays by the big three writers became dominant, perhaps having been selected to be used for educational purposes – and perhaps accounting for the fact that what survives now “are on edifying subjects, and with no dodgy sex”.

Hundreds of years later, some of these texts were still being copied in monasteries, and our earliest surviving manuscripts date from around the 10th and 11th centuries. But along the way, there had been a catastrophic loss of hundreds of works. According to a somewhat wistful Wright: “It’s not impossible that other plays survive in libraries – miscatalogued, perhaps.” He would like to find a particular trilogy by Xenocles – the now utterly obscure playwright who won first prize in the Great Dionysia, beating Sophocles’s Oedipus into second place.