ABSTRACT
Aristophanes in the Frogs, using Aeschylus as his porte-parole, ranked Sophocles above Euripides. But Aristophanes’ idiosyncratic opinion was not necessarily shared by others. According to the entry in the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium ‘Judging from the number of surviving MSS, Euripides was the most popular of the great tragedians.’ A conclusion that Euripides might not be the most important and the most popular author, provokes a question why the Christos Paschon, commonly called the Euripidean cento, is so heavily based on his plays? The success of a cento requires that both the author and the audience knew the primary text(s) and that the audience could appreciate the centonist’s alterations. Therefore, the full message of the cento could be completely understood only by reading/decoding the recycled lines against the hypotext.
