Page "Euripides" Paragraph 58

It is from such materials that modern scholars try to piece together copies of the original plays.

Sometimes the picture is almost lost.

Thus for example two extant plays, The Phoenicean Women and Iphigenia at Aulis, are significantly corrupted by interpolations ( the latter possibly being completed post mortem by the poet's son ) and the very authorship of Rhesus is a matter of dispute.

In fact, the very existence of the Alphabet plays, or rather the absence of an equivalent edition for Sophocles and Aeschylus, could distort our notions of distinctive Euripidean qualitiesmost of his least ' tragic ' plays are in the Alphabet edition and possibly the other two tragedians would appear just as genre-bending as this " restless experimenter " if we possessed more than their ' select ' editions.