Euripides Electra [Second Edition] by Martin J. Cropp (review)

This second edition of Cropp’s Electracommentary is much more than a correction of the 1988 edition; it is a thorough revision of the work that brings new clarity to the Greek text, its translation and to the interpretation of the play. Cropp has thoughtfully responded to the suggestions of his original reviewers (especially Craik and Lloyd), ¹but it is to his great credit that he has also assimilated much new scholarship on the play. In the 25 years since the first edition appeared, a steady stream of work in the area of textual criticism and literary interpretation on the Electrahas appeared. One can see the influence of this prodigious scholarship, and Cropp’s engagement with it, in all areas of the new edition: the introduction, Greek text, translation, and notes have all been fully revised. In places Cropp has changed his thinking about the text, or about its interpretation; in many more places he has retained his original reading but added supporting notes or clarified his presentation. This commentary offers an accessible and streamlined discussion of many thorny issues, guided by a fine literary sensitivity and appreciation for Euripidean dramaturgy. For students and scholars who are new to the play, this new edition should be the first resource to which they turn.

As in the first edition, the Introduction offers a carefully balanced and sensible discussion of the play’s structure, characters, themes, and relationship to previous and contemporary treatments of the myth. Some changes to the exposition are minor, but suggest the shifting currents in tragic scholarship: for example the matricide is now described as the “tragic focus of the play” (2013: 1) rather than the “tragic essence of the play” (1988: xxix). Similarly a cursory reference to Orestes as an “ephebe-hunter” (1988: xliii) has been removed from the new edition in favour of other emphases that are more evident in the play (such as Orestes as athlete, and as sacrificial officiant, 2013:19). Other changes are more substantial, and a noticeable improvement over the first edition. For example, in the original section on “Actors, Characters and Chorus,” the Chorus was given only a single paragraph of attention, which began with the rather unappealingly expressed observation that (1988: xl–xli) “[t]he Chorus of young women are another part of the mundane background [of the play].” In the revised edition the Chorus are now given their own subsection, and a much fuller discussion of their important role in the play (2013: 14–16). It is now much more difficult for a reader to come away with the impression that the Electra’s Chorus confirms the stereotype (no longer widely held) that Euripides hastened the tendency to treat choruses as mere embolima(“insertions”) disconnected from the action of the play. Another improved section is that on “Euripides and the Oresteia Tradition” (originally titled “Euripides and his Predecessors”), which includes an entirely new discussion and comparison with the other Euripidean plays that treat the Orestes myth (2013: 28–31). On the question of the relative dating of the plays by Sophocles and Euripides, Cropp rightfully offers an abundance of caution, and presents the case for either possibility. Indeed, the discussion is so cautiously hedged that I had to reread it carefully before confirming that Cropp tentatively suggests that Sophocles’ play precedes Euripides’. As he realizes, however, a more interesting matter for interpretation than that of the relative dating are the different emphases and concerns that each playwright brought to his version of the myth; about this we can speak more confidently, and the commentary notes are filled with very fine observations regarding the differences between the Sophoclean and Euripidean characters. It is a pity that Isabelle Torrance’s Metapoetry in Euripidesappeared too late for Cropp to take her arguments into account on these issues. ²

Whereas the first edition reprinted Diggle’s OCT text (1981), Cropp has prepared his own Greek text and apparatus criticusfor this...