ANCIENT EPIDAURUS, Greece -- As plays go, it took a long time for *Hypsipyle* to make the modern stage -- some 2,000 years.
The work by Euripides, one of ancient Greece's most famous playwrights, was lost until fragments of the text resurfaced in a pile of Egyptian garbage last century.

This summer, spectators will finally be able to see a reconstruction of the play, whose reputation filtered through the centuries. It will be showing in this ancient theater, 109 miles southwest of Athens, and in three other cities in Greece through Aug. 26.

Euripides wrote more than 90 plays, including *Medea,* *Electra* and *Trojan Women.* But less than two dozen survive in full. One of Euripides' last works before his death in 406 B.C., *Hypsipyle* falls into the category of an ironic drama.

First performed around 408 B.C., *Hypsipyle* tells the myth of an exiled queen who is sold into slavery after secretly sparing her father, who was to be killed along with all the other men on the Greek island of Lemnos. The island's women murdered their men because they abandoned them following a curse by the goddess Aphrodite.

As the play opens, Hypsipyle, now a nursemaid on mainland Greece, tells her tale to the baby she cradles in her arms -- the son of the king to whom she was sold. During the play, she inadvertently causes the infant's death and has to deal with the consequences.

That opening narrative is not only a classic Euripidean device, but it is also one of the few complete pieces of *Hypsipyle* that have been discovered.

*It was not saved in its entirety but in many fragments, a variety that runs the whole length of the work,* according to reconstructor and translator Tassos Roussos.

Pieces of *Hypsipyle* were discovered in 1906 among 100,000 pieces of papyrus found at an ancient garbage dump excavated at Oxyrhynchus, 99 miles southwest of Cairo, Egypt, according to professor Peter Parsons, director of Oxford's Oxyrhynchus Papyri project.

Parsons said the dig recovered mostly Greek texts from an area that was inhabited in part by Greek settlers for about 1,000 years.

About 95% of Greek literature was permanently lost during the Middle Ages, he said.

*With finds of papyri like these, we actually get back before that time and pick up works which we knew existed,* Parsons added.

He called *Hypsipyle* one of the most *sensational* works because of its size, both textual and physical.

*Most often in these rubbish dumps you find a long torn page . . . in a bad state, eaten by worms and so on, but it is a unique manuscript,* Parsons said.

The text of *Hypsipyle* was copied around the middle of the second century onto the back of an *account of receipt and expenditure* dating to the first century, Parsons said.