W.'s hefty commentary, two handsome volumes coming in at 1,142 pages, on the six forensic speeches of Isocrates marks a considerable second wave of interest in the author within the past 30 years. The commentary seeks to right a wrong. It concerns itself with texts that are generally found lacking or are ignored and are only to be mined for political, social, economic or historical insights, as W. laments in the introduction (p. vii). And it comes out just ahead of S. Martinelli Tempesta's long awaited OCT edition, which W. frequently acknowledges. Accordingly, the commentary seeks to demonstrate that even what appears to be unpromising may actually be a basis for a rich and productive, because detailed, analysis.

W.'s work follows the conventional structure of a commentary. He begins with an introduction on the forensic speeches, dealing with the author's biography, which makes him an ‘accidental dikographos’, his reputation and his standing in the rhetorical tradition. He then treats each of the forensic speeches in a larger typeface with an overall discussion of each speech. It appears that they come either in a random order or perhaps in the order in which W. worked on the speeches since there is no other apparent logic for the structure of the commentary: 21, 18, 20, 16, 17 and 19. W. discusses the litigants, the date of the work, the issue involved, about which little is often known, and the speech's general structure. This is followed by the text, on one side Greek, which is most indebted to Γ and is supplemented by the readings of Martinelli Tempesta, with the translation on the facing page. After this, we are given the very detailed and generally excellent commentary, which addresses textual issues as well as social and political details. There are two short appendices: the first on the iustitium, which was the temporary closure of the courts for business, and the second on the amnesty that followed the oligarchy of 403 bce.

Lawcourt speeches are generally troublesome because they deal with often petty matters, and everything in them is somewhat uncertain. W. is fully aware of this as he acknowledges the state of controversy by citing the work of other scholars, who either agree with or differ from his views. Moreover, he is to be commended for his interest in determining functions and meanings of the legal speeches because legalities are based on details and nuances. He is sensitive to turns of phrases and what words might signify. For instance, he glosses δέομενος at 21.1 as ‘he is asking’, as opposed to G. Mathieu/É. Brémond, L. Van Hook and D. Mirhady, who prefer to render it as ‘dans le besoin’/ ‘in need’ (p. 110), while on p. 126 he offers ‘(such) apprehensions about the political situation’ for τὰ καθεστῶτα ἐφοβεῖτο. He sides with Mathieu/Brémond, Mirhady and C. Ley-Hutton in preferring a less definite translation than Van Hook, who sees καθεστῶτα as ‘the government’. On p. 766, W. puts ‘grounds for fair treatment’ as a preferred reading to Van Hook's ‘claims to justice’ for dikaia.

Of particular historical and politico-social interest is W.'s commentary on ‘On the Horse-Team’, perhaps the best known of the speeches, because it concerns the younger Alcibiades, his father and the scandal in which this family is enmeshed while touching on the particularly sensitive issue of the Thirty. W. is familiar with the historical background, which he discusses at some length to enrich the commentary. After all, the Athenian audience would have been aware of what the name ‘Alcibiades’ – both junior and senior – signified and meant to the state. W. deals with the Mysteries, mentioned at section 6 of the speech at pp. 494–9, citing useful bibliography.

Despite appearing to follow the conventional form for a commentary, W.'s work is somewhat idiosyncratic because he assumes an actively dialogic approach. He comments on past and more recent scholarship, and he takes on board Mirhady's translation of the speeches for the series The Oratory of Classical Greece – and he has no compunctions about rejecting his translation, as he does at p. 891. But he also engages with other more contemporary and ongoing scholarship: he quite literally enters into conversation with other scholars, meaning that this work has an immediate currency and relevance. He cites conversations with Gagarin on pp. 392 and 423, although he disagrees with him on p. 360, but the majority of the engagement is with L. Rubinstein, his former colleague at Queen's Belfast and an expert on Attic oratory, whom he continually cites, often at great length (e.g. pp. 516, 521, 528, 532, 573–4 etc.).

There is one important concern that W. sidesteps in his work, the fact that Isocrates denies writing any dicanic speeches, a fact to which I have previously drawn attention (see Y.L. Too, The Rhetoric of Identity in Isocrates: Text, Power, Pedagogy [1995], pp. 28–9 and 81–4). Dicanic speeches were the domain of logographers, the vilified and reviled professional speech writers, which W. notes at pp. 26ff. Their orations may not have always been written for court cases but rather for reading audiences, as in the case of Antiphon's Tetralogies, something W. briefly recognises at p. 15, when querying their possible inauthenticity. Yet W. backs off from this position and treats the speeches as orations delivered in the lawcourts. He insists on the authenticity of the Lochites at p. 356, although his insistence that it was authentic begs more questions. These six speeches he declares ‘Isok.'s true speeches’, which, he states, are in turn echoed by ten of the fourteen works written between 380 and 340 bce. What is a ‘true’ speech, as distinct from or opposed to a ‘false’ speech? W. is the sort of historian who seems to hold to facticity as his ideal. So, does the process of presenting an oration in its literary form not always make it other than ‘true’, I ask, as the author writes with a view to satisfying the literary audience? (My current view is that speech writers would deny the fact that they had produced speeches for the lawcourts to protect their own reputations.)

W. may not have seen the larger forest for the trees, but that does not detract from the value of his commentary. It is a comprehensive and detailed study of Isocrates’ six forensic speeches, which may or may not be fictional; and as such, it will certainly occupy a place on my bookshelves as a useful reference text.