“Since You're Mortal.
By James Romm
Norton, 176 pages, $24.99
It is estimated that roughly 1,500 plays graced the theaters of ancient Greece. There, the theatrical arts were an important centerpiece of civic life and, according to the classicist James Romm, a medium through which the entire polis could collectively wrestle "with vital questions of ethics and politics, through the vehicle of inherited myth."
Of these plays, only 46 or so have survived into the present. Most of the rest fell victim to the judgment of late-Roman scribes who, when faced with having to determine which works should make the leap from fragile papyrus scrolls to the newer, more durable (and more expensive) vellum, opted to prioritize the canonical works of Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides and Sophocles, leaving the rest to rot.
But not everyone had such a low opinion of these discarded works. In "Since You're Mortal," Mr. Romm gives readers a sneak peek into a much larger project being undertaken by Oxford University Press -- the first-ever English translation of a remarkable anthology compiled in the fifth century A.D., a multivolume work that contains a treasure trove of excerpts and quotations from many of the ancient Greek dramatic works long thought to have been lost to time. Gathering together some of the anthology's pithiest and most striking quotations, Mr. Romm's book is an intriguing and occasionally frustrating aperitif that doesn't fully satisfy but is nonetheless stimulating.
The author of the original anthology was a man named Johannes who hailed from the Macedonian town of Stobi. Known to posterity as "Stobaeus," he lived in a time of turbulence, when "the Roman Empire was collapsing in the West but holding up better in the Greek-speaking East." Amid this upheaval, he wanted to be sure that his son, Septimius, inherited the wisdom of the ancient Greeks -- but doubted whether Septimius would have the patience to wade through a vast corpus of 1,000-year-old works.
"For his son's sake," writes Mr. Romm, "he began compiling quotes from those texts, drawing on works of all types, both poetry and prose." Over time, what began as a kind of late-antique study guide grew into a massive, multivolume anthology, featuring the thoughts of hundreds of Greek poets, philosophers, statesmen and playwrights, organized into an ethical program that speaks to the challenges faced in each stage of life. "Since You're Mortal" focuses on the playwrights, and represents the first time any part of Stobaeus' anthology has been published in English.
Taking his cues from Stobaeus, Mr. Romm has divided his book into neat little sections that focus on a particular vice, virtue or common aspect of the human condition, such as friendship, lust, politics and death.
While each quotation provides something to muse over, the whole thing might be best summed up by a line from the comic poet Alexis: "The entire human condition's completely insane."
In the face of such insanity, Stobaeus seems to be prodding Septimius toward a classically Epicurean style of living, one that accepts the finality of death and recognizes the importance of taking pleasure in what the world has to offer while one can.
"When one can lie down next to a beautiful woman and grab hold of two jars of wine from Lesbos, this is the 'wise man,' this is philosophy's 'Good,' " says the playwright Baton.
Mr. Romm notes that though the Roman Empire in Stobaeus' time was largely Christianized, there's little evidence of that in the anthology. "Stobaeus offers his son a strictly pagan view of the afterlife, as a grim and joyless eternity spent underground."
Stobaeus knew that neither he nor the writers he quoted had all the answers. He often purposely selected quotations in opposition to one another, creating a dialectic through which his son could come to his own conclusions. Mr. Romm emphasizes this through close juxtapositions: From Diphilus, a fourth-century comic writer, we learn that "time is a strange craftsman; it refashions all of us but makes us always worse."
But in the next line, his contemporary Menander asserts that though it may rob us of our vitality, time nevertheless "adds to our acuity of mind."
More than a few of the quotes featured in "Since You're Mortal" are crushingly banal. One can imagine poor Septimius rolling his eyes at his earnest father's attempts to bridge their generational divide with suggestions like "living's a fine thing, provided one learns how to do it" or "ignorance is a misfortune we bring on ourselves." And while it's certainly nice to have a compendium of sayings from the forgotten playwrights of the past, it's perhaps no surprise that it's the more familiar writers featured in the book whose passages tend to stand out, particularly Euripides, whose vivid language helps elevate his quotations. "May they all die an evil death," he writes, "those who take joy in kingship and the rule of the few in the state. Freedom's a word that's worth everything."
"Since You're Mortal" occupies an awkward space. As a precis to a larger, more scholarly work, it lacks the depth and historical context that many enthusiasts of classical drama may be hungry for. It's clearly vying to be shelved alongside the sententious Stoic self-help books that have become trendy among seekers of meme-able ancient wisdom in recent years. Mr. Romm complicates matters further by adding quotes from other sources to Stobaeus' selections, diluting the book's ability to show us the anthologist's true intent. But to seek perfection here may be missing the point. "There's nobody who's happy in all things," according to Nicostratus, paraphrasing Euripides. "By Athena you've put all life compactly in one line."” [1]
1. Advice From Ancient Greece. Brady, Michael Patrick. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 09 June 2026: A13.
