You're going to be. So, The Hello and welcome back to the history of ancient Greece.

Episode 50, Early Tragedy and Escales.

Up until the Hellenistic period, all of the tragedies that were put on during the Dionysia

were exclusive pieces written in honor of Dionysus and performed only once.

The result is that once the reiteration of old

tragedies became the norm later, the Hellenistic tragedies could only perform the

plays that either made such a lasting impression that they were remembered well enough to warrant

being repeated, or those that were written down and survived the accidents of time, in addition

to the subjective tastes of the Hellenistic librarians, who played a role in what was copied and thus preserved, and what was not and thus lost.

So if that being said, we only have a fraction of the plays that were produced by these men.

And furthermore, there were other great playwrights who we have nothing from, besides maybe

some of the titles of the plays that they performed. So it's important to realize that

while there is a reason that we have plays from the playwrights that we have, they were

the headliners. There are also many more playwrights, performing plays in classical Athens. It was not just these

four guys and I will try to talk about some of the lesser known ones as best as we possibly can. While no texts of drama exist from the 6th century BC, we do know the names of three

other competitors besides Thespis, who we mentioned last episode. Those would be Correlis, Pratinous, and Phrenicus. Very little is

known of the first two though. Correlis lived from 546 to 460 BC and exhibited his first play at the age of 22 in 524 BC.

He staged 160 plays and won the prize 13 times.

During these early years, Corellis competed often with

Prattinous. He produced 50 plays, 32 of which were Sader Plays, which he was

said to have introduced.

Sader plays were distinct from tragedy.

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