Patched-Up Ancient Greek Play Finally Lands on Modern Stage

As plays go, it took a long time for “Hypsipyle” to make the modern stage--some 2,000 years.

The work by Euripides, one of ancient Greece’s most famous playwrights, was lost until fragments of the text resurfaced in a pile of Egyptian garbage last century.

This summer, spectators will finally be able to see a reconstruction of a play whose reputation filtered through the centuries. It will be showing in this ancient theater, 109 miles southwest of Athens, and in three other cities around Greece through Aug. 26.

Euripides wrote more than 90 plays before his death in 406 BC, including “Medea,” “Electra” and “Trojan Women.” But less than two dozen survive in full.

“Hypsipyle” falls into the category of an ironic drama. First performed around 408 BC, it tells the myth of an exiled queen who is sold into slavery after secretly sparing her father, who was to be killed along with all the other men on the Greek island of Lemnos. The island’s women murdered their men because they abandoned them following a curse by the goddess Aphrodite.

As the play opens, Hypsipyle, now a nursemaid on mainland Greece, tells her tale to the baby she cradles in her arms--the son of the king to whom she was sold. During the play, she inadvertently causes the infant’s death and has to deal with the consequences.

That opening narrative is not only a classic Euripidean device, but it is also one of the few complete pieces of “Hypsipyle” that have been discovered.

“It was not saved in its entirety but in many fragments, a variety that runs the whole length of the work,” according to reconstructor and translator Tassos Roussos.

Pieces of “Hypsipyle” were discovered in 1906 among 100,000 pieces of papyrus found at an ancient garbage dump excavated at Oxyrhynchus, 99 miles southwest of Cairo, according to professor Peter Parsons, director of Oxford’s Oxyrhynchus Papyri project.

While the original text is currently housed at Oxford’s Bodleian Library, the fragments were published in 1908 and became a source of different scholarly views, said Roussos, who has translated nearly all of Euripides’ work.

Of the original 1,600-odd lines, 400 complete lines and “a lot of fragments” were discovered, Parsons said.

Roussos said that left him with “the risk of trying to fill the gaps.” Although the plot of “Hypsipyle” is known from mythology, that is not enough. He based his reconstruction on ancient sources, decades-old studies, scholars’ opinions and his own experience.