His work is of special importance to me because, strange as it sounds, much of what I know about the art of constructing a story I learned by studying the plays of Sophocles and his fellow Greek playwrights Aeschylus and Euripides, and a book about their work by the British critic H.D.F. Kitto. In an autobiographical essay I wrote a quarter of a century ago I explained how Kitto, back when I was an undergraduate at Columbia University, had helped me toward my goal of becoming a successful science fiction writer:

"I bought a copy of Kitto’s Greek Tragedy in 1954, as collateral reading for a course in Greek plays that I was taking during my junior year at Columbia. . . . Kitto began with the premise that each Greek tragedy was built around a significant dramatic situation designed to create the kind of tension that would provide the desired release for the audience when the tension was resolved. In his Poetics, Aristotle asserted that that was what Greek tragedy was all about: catharsis, the purging of pity and fear. Aristotle had used as his prime technical example Oedipus the King by Sophocles. But Kitto observed that many other surviving Greek plays failed to follow the technical rules that Aristotle, working from Oedipus, had laid down as the fundamental requirements for a Greek tragedy. Did that mean that other Greek playwrights (and sometimes even Sophocles himself) had done a lot of incompetent work?

"No," Kitto said. "We know that the plays that have come down to us were warmly hailed in their time and evidently had fulfilled the requirements of their audience. Their authors must be regarded as masters of their art, in full technical command. If sometimes their plays seem poorly constructed to us, static and undramatic, it must be because we are failing to find the true dramatic center of them. Instead of dismissing those plays as badly made," Kitto argued, "we need to reexamine our own assumptions about their structure."

From Kitto I learned how to find the true dramatic center of a Greek tragedy. He taught me what a dramatic situation really is: a zone of inevitable opposition of powerful forces that emit ever-widening reverberations until they are neutralized somehow in a way that creates understanding, insight, and harmony. Knowing that, I could work backward from my perception of my story’s central issue to generate its plot. What created this conflict? What can possibly resolve it? Who is being hurt by it, and why? Those are the questions I learned to ask myself; and out of them came Thorns, To Live Again, Dying Inside, Lord Valentine’s Castle, and all the rest.

One thing that fascinated me, as I pursued my studies in Greek drama–studies that have continued to this day–is that the little group of plays we have (seven of Sophocles, seven of Aeschylus, nineteen of Euripides) is only a fraction of the total output of these great artists. It was the custom of most Greek playwrights to offer a quartet of plays to the Athenian public every year–usually a trilogy of serious plays on some theme out of Homer or the Greek myths, accompanied by a short and mocking comic play satirizing the first three. Thus a long-lived playwright like Sophocles might have written a hundred plays or more during his career.

That any of them have survived after twenty-five hundred years of turmoil and destruction is, I suppose, miraculous. Copies of the plays were stored in the libraries of such Greek cities as Ephesus, Antioch, and Pergamum, but after the great library of Alexandria in Egypt was founded, about 300 b.c., Alexandria gradually acquired the other great libraries of the Hellenic world, thus putting all the eggs in the same basket–and so, when the Alexandria library was destroyed after the Islamic conquest of that city, much of classical literature was lost as a result of the centralization of the collections in that single place. And we know–from a surviving catalog of the plays of Aeschylus and from references in Greek textbooks that have come down to us–that the losses included hundreds of works by the great Greek dramatists.

From time to time, in my own work, I have sent time travelers back into the vanished past, and my regret over the loss of these Greek masterpieces is demonstrated by such passages as this, from my time-travel novel Up the Line:

" ‘Dr. Speer,’ Metaxas said, ‘is here [ancient Constantinople] on a collecting trip. He’s a student of classical Greek drama, in search of lost plays.’

"Dr. Speer clicked his heels. He was the sort of Teutonic pedant who, you automatically know, would use his full academic title on all occasions. . . . Speer said, ‘It has been most successful for me so far. Of course, my search is just beginning, yet already from Byzantine libraries I have obtained the Nausicaa and Triptolemus of Sophocles, and of Euripides the Andromeda, the Peliades, the Phaethon, and the Oedipus, and also of Aeschylus a nearly complete manuscript of The Women of Aetna. So you see that I have done well.’ He clicked his heels again."

I wrote that in 1968. At that time I believed that only the names of these plays survived, and not a scrap of their texts. But a few months ago there came into my hands a surprising little volume called Sophocles: Fragments. It was edited and translated by Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Emeritus Professor of Greek at Oxford, and was published in 1996 by the inestimable Loeb Classical Library of Harvard.

And here they are: the Nausicaa and the Triptolemus that I cited in my time-travel novel, and the Phaedra as well, the Troilus, the Priam, the Heracles, and over a hundred more. Of course, Professor Lloyd-Jones is unable to provide very much of these plays. In some cases, only a single sentence survives, quoted by some later Greek scholar whose own book has happened to come down to us. These are not particularly useful to those who seek some sense of Sophocles’ dramatic art. From The Infant Heracles we have only two sentences: "For it is better to oblige gods than to oblige mortals" and "For the doer is bound to suffer somewhat." Most surviving fragments of the other lost plays are equally cryptic, though some of them, even with all context lost, do show the spark of Sophocles’ dramatic power.

Some plays have fared better. These have reached us not as brief quotations from other authors, but as actual segments of the text found by archaeologists in papyrus scrolls in Egyptian ruins. One, The Search-ers, runs to more than a dozen pages, giving us a boisterous scene of drunken satyrs searching for Apollo’s lost cattle–the only good example we have of Sophocles’ comic side. A few others exist in fragments five or six pages long. One of these, the Eurypylus, dramatizes in quite moving fashion a scene out of the latter days of the Trojan War, but sputters out in semi-coherence with:

". . . died . . . fortunate . . . he made a glorious end . . . ordinance . . . there be established now . . . statues that may sit together . . . the company of Telephus . . . close at hand . . . feasts . . . for him, and not without . . . giving birth to . . . bereft of . . . newly cut coil of hair."

There’s a certain mysterious poetry in that, yes, but not the sort of poetry one associates with the great Greek tragedians. We are left only with the shadow of a piece of a play.

For most of the others, we have even less. I would surely like to read Sophocles’ Phaedra and compare his handling of that powerful story with Euripides’ extant play on the theme. (Phaedra, the daughter of Minos of Crete and the wife of Theseus, is rebuffed in love by Hippolytus, Theseus’ son by an earlier marriage, and vengefully lodges a false accusation of rape against Hippolytus. Theseus, enraged, has his son slain by Poseidon, but eventually discovers his terrible mistake.) Alas, all we have of Sophocles’ version is a series of scattered sentences such as "For it is not right that a noble man should take pleasure when the pleasure is not right" and "If you go through them all, you will not find a single mortal who is fortunate in all things."

And then, the Thyestes, about the dreadful crime that brought a curse lasting many generations upon the house of Atreus–Niobe, about the proud queen who boasted about her children to the mother of Apollo and Artemis, and was cruelly punished for it–The Madness of Odysseus, in which the great Greek warrior tries to evade serving in the Trojan War by pretending he’s lost his mind–

But we aren’t going to get to read them, aside from the stray bits and snatches that exist today. The rest will have to wait for the development of workable time travel.

The real and somber lesson I draw from this book of fragmentary plays of Sophocles is that one day all our words will be lost. The digits will decay, the dictionaries crumble. Eat, drink, be merry. Read what we have while we have it. And find some way of storing the texts, superior to the electronic means that we so foolishly are letting ourselves depend on nowadays, that will preserve them for future generations at least as well as those papyri in the Egyptian desert kept some of the Greek classics alive for our delight.