In Since You’re Mortal: Life Lessons from the Lost Greek Plays (W.W. Norton; May 5, 2026), Bard College classicist James Romm, PhD. gathers newly translated passages from ancient tragedies and comedies preserved because a fifth-century compiler, Stobaeus, excerpted them as moral guidance for his son.
The result is not a philosophical treatise but something arguably older and sharper: dramatic ethics in short, concise, witty statements that hold a universal observation about life. Organized by themes such as courage, love, luck, grief, justice, and public life, these brief, powerful passages read like timeless commencement counsel. Honest about hardship yet clear about character, this is a humanities-rooted gift for graduates stepping into an uncertain world.
The advice invites graduates to wrestle with resilience, self-knowledge, responsibility, and the unpredictability of adult life. Because these lines come from plays originally performed before the citizens of Athens, where drama served as a public forum for ethical and political debate, they offer a natural bridge to conversations about civic responsibility, intellectual humility, and entering public life.
I had a chance to learn more in this interview.
In classical Athens, drama was more than entertainment. Tragedies and comedies were performed before large civic audiences during religious festivals, where citizens gathered to watch stories that explored questions about justice, power, responsibility, and the limits of human control. Through mythic narratives and striking lines of verse, playwrights such as Sophocles, Euripides, and Menander invited audiences to reflect on human conduct and the consequences of choice.
The fragments preserved in Since You’re Mortal show how these plays often condensed their moral insight into memorable lines. Such statements lingered in the mind and circulated beyond the theater, shaping how people thought about fortune, character, and the conditions of human life.
What can modern students learn from ancient Greek plays?
The Greek dramatists were deeply interested in the problem of how to live under conditions we cannot fully control. Their characters confront ambition, love, loss, injustice, and mortality—experiences that remain familiar today.
What students often discover in these plays is a form of wisdom that does not promise easy solutions. Instead, the poets emphasize courage, moderation, self-knowledge, and an awareness of how quickly fortune can change. Even brief fragments can capture this perspective with striking clarity, reminding us that the ancient stage was a place where human vulnerability was examined with honesty and precision.
Why is it important to recognize lesser-known tragedies and comedies, even if we only have excerpts?
Only a small portion of Greek drama survives in complete form. While a handful of plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes were copied and preserved, hundreds of others disappeared over time. In many cases, the only traces of these works survive as quotations preserved by later writers.
Even a single line can preserve the voice of a lost play. These fragments broaden our understanding of the ancient theatrical tradition and remind us that what we possess today represents only a small remnant of what once existed. By recovering these scattered pieces, we glimpse the wider range of ideas and perspectives that animated the Greek stage.
Dr. Romm has spent decades immersed in Greek and Roman culture and civilization and is one of today’s most respected classicists in America. He is the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College and the author of numerous acclaimed books, including Plato and the Tyrant, Ghost on the Throne, and Dying Every Day. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and The London Review of Books.
About James Romm: https://www.
James Romm is the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. He specializes in ancient Greek and Roman culture and civilization and is the author of numerous acclaimed books, including Plato and the Tyrant, Ghost on the Throne, and Dying Every Day. In addition to writing narrative history, he has edited and translated major works of classical literature for modern readers, helping bring the ancient world into contemporary conversation.
Romm’s reviews and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The London Review of Books, The Daily Beast, and other publications. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Birkelund Fellowship at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library, and a Biography Fellowship at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York.
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