A Companion to Greek Tragedy (review)

The thirty-one chapters of this welcome volume are gathered under four headings: Contexts, Elements, Approaches, and Reception. The first and last are essentially the same as two of the three sections of the Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy (1997), with which this volume obviously invites comparison (see below). The third Cambridge heading is "The Plays," which are better served here by "Elements," with six chapters (Myth, Beginnings and Endings, Lyric, Episodes, Music, Theatrical Production), and "Approaches," with ten. Of the ten, four actually constitute a separate category, compact and capable surveys of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Lost Tragedies. The remaining six include some of my favorites, lively essays that prove that the proliferating companions and guides can appeal to specialists, too. Each has its own excellences. Douglas Cairns on "Values" does justice to his complex subject without being technical or polemical, and he makes effective use of Ajax as a closing case study. Donald Mastronarde surveys "The Gods" magisterially and with characteristically sound judgment. Mark Griffith on "Authority Figures" offers stimulating original work on a non-obvious topic; I plan to reread and study this essay. The second word in Judith Mossman's title, "Women's Voices," is not otiose: rather than another chapter surveying women's roles or the sex-gender "system," familiar and important topics that impinge in one way or another on several other contributions, she gives a taste of new research that shows through well-chosen examples how far from exhausted her subject is. Readers should be warned, however, that Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood's essay on "Tragedy and Anthropology" is rather thin on its announced subject; mostly, the author again deploys her favored critical terms "zooming" and "distancing" in brief studies of Aeschylus' Eumenides and Euripides' lost Erechtheus.

The aims of the series encourage contributors to engage in controversy if they wish. Three who do are Scott Scullion on "Tragedy and Religion: The Problem of Origins" (effective and totally fair to the opposing orthodoxy), Jocelyn Penny Small on "Pictures of Tragedy?" (usefully skeptical in the main, but with a tendency to battle straw men and thus a little misleading as to the state of the field), and Neil Croally on "Tragedy's Teaching" (largely a reply to critics of his 1994 book). Most contributors do a conscientious (and some a brilliant) job of presenting their topics broadly yet concisely, with inviting hints of issues and controversies too involved to receive detailed treatment. Of those not yet mentioned, some of the best, in my opinion, are Deborah Roberts on "Beginnings and Endings," John Davidson on "Theatrical Production," the book's editor Justina Gregory on Euripides, David Kovacs on "Text and Transmission," Albert Henrichs on Nietzsche, and Paul Woodruff on translation. Two of the most demanding essays are Luigi Batte-zzato's on "Lyric" (unavoidably technical) and Stephen Hallowell's on "Ancient Responses" (intricately argued), but both repay the extra effort they require. Masterful use of brief case studies is made by Christopher Pelling on rhetoric and performance culture and Herman Altena on recent productions and adaptations. The suggestions for further reading at the end of each essay are usually valuable; a bibliography of works cited and a useful index complete the volume.

As everyone knows, the field is becoming crowded with guides and companions. As their publishers hope, students, scholars, and educated general readers can indeed find something of value in all of them. As long as they exist only in exorbitantly priced cloth editions, Brill's Companions are, of course, out of the question for classroom use. So far, only the earliest Blackwell Companion (to the Hellenistic World, 2003) has been issued in paperback, but if the others also enter this market at around $35, they may give the Cambridge series a run for its money. The present volume is some 50 percent larger than its Cambridge counterpart and performs more of the duties of a reference or textbook without stinting on stimulating and...