95% of Ancient Greek Theater Is Gone. Here's How One Classicist Resurrected 500 Lost Playwrights

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Of the estimated 1,500 plays written in ancient Greece, only 33 complete works survive today—the rest were lost because medieval scribes deemed low-brow comedies and mass entertainment unworthy of expensive parchment during the transition from fragile papyrus to durable vellum, prioritizing canonical tragedies and Christian-compatible texts over Menander's seriocomic dramas and experimental works about shapeshifting heroes. The only reason we know anything about hundreds of these vanished plays is Joannes Stobaeus's fifth-century AD Anthologion, a four-volume anthology of excerpts from over 500 Greek authors compiled to educate his son Septimius, preserving bite-sized quotations that…