Sky here with another episode of the History and Plug podcast.

Of the estimated 1,500 plays written in ancient Greece, only 33 complete works survived today.

The rest were lost because medieval scribes deemed low-brow comedies and mass entertainment

unworthy of the laborious process of translating them to Latin,

or buying the expensive parchment during the transition from papyrus to durable vellum,

and wanted to prioritize tragedies and Christian-compatible text over Menander's experimental works about

shape-shifting heroes. The only reason we know anything about hundreds of these vanished

plays is because of Johannes Stobias. He was a 5th century Byzantine who compiled the

Anthologian, a four-volume anthology of excerpts from over 500 Greek authors, compiled to educate

his son's Septimus. This book preserves bite-sized quotations that warn good people don't always

prosper, power favors the shameless, and politics rarely rewards the jest.

Today's guest is James Rom, author of Since You're Mortal, Life Lessons from the Lost Greek plays.

We discuss how Stobias reveals lost works, like Sophocles Achilles' lovers, which features shape-shifting and humanized heroes that are far more experimental

than surviving plays, why some of the lost plays may have deserved to disappear forever,

sort of like VHS copies of B-movies like Deathbed, The Bed That Eats, that are rotting away

on thrift store shelves and haven't been transferred to HD format, and how Ron became the first

scholar to translate many of these fragments

as poetry for English language readers. We enjoy this discussion with James Rom.

And one more thing before we get started with this episode, a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

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