The ‘Oxford Greek and Latin College Commentaries’ series is designed for intermediate and advanced students. Several volumes have already appeared, including Aristophanes’ Wasps edited by Kenneth Rothwell (2019). The format of this commentary is to give an average of eight lines of the Greek text, taken from the Oxford Classical Text of Hugh Lloyd-Jones and Nigel Wilson, at the top of each page, with notes underneath which mostly explain vocabulary, grammar and syntax. It seems to be assumed that the reader will start with almost no Greek, as the most basic vocabulary and constructions are explained. On the other hand, the explanations can go into considerable detail. Take, for example, the note on Agamemnon’s fatal boast after killing a stag in the sacred grove of Artemis, οὗ κατὰ σφάγας | ἐκκομπάσας ἔπος τι τυγχάνει βαλών (568–69): ‘^+*τυγχάνει historical present for vividness, standing mostly for narrative aorist (with supplem. ptc. ἐκκομπάσας: S#1883; SS 186§5; GMT#33. When an aorist ptc. is used with τυγχάνω, λαγχάνω or φθάνω in present or imperfect indicative, it is not coincidental with the finite verb but retains its own reference to past time: S#2096b, GMT#146; SS 261§12f); > “about whose killing (οὗ κατὰ σφάγας) he (happened to have slipped) slipped some boastful word after hitting (βαλών) it”’. The symbol ⁺ before τυγχάνει indicates that its meaning will not be given again in the notes as it should be learned by the student at this point, and that it appears in the glossary after the commentary. Words which appear only once or twice are translated in the commentary but do not appear in the glossary. The asterisk before τυγχάνει indicates that τυγχάνω appears in the list of ‘Irregular (and Unpredictable) Principal Parts’ at the end. The abbreviations refer to the standard reference works H.W. Smyth, Greek Grammar (rev. G.M. Messing, Harvard 1956), W.W. Goodwin, Syntax of the Moods and Tenses of the Greek Verb (Boston 1890) and A.C. Moorhouse, The Syntax of Sophocles (Leiden 1982). J.D. Denniston’s The Greek Particles (2nd edn, Oxford 1954) is also frequently cited. This is all very good, and the student who absorbs the information in this commentary will know a lot of Greek by the end. The pedagogical structure has been carefully considered. The implied reader seems to be intelligent and committed, but lacking much grounding in Greek. Sophocles is difficult, and one might ideally assume a certain level of Greek in students who attempt him, but that may not always be feasible.

The commentary is almost entirely linguistic, and literary interpretation is mostly confined to the introduction. The discussion of the performance context includes some statements which need more qualification and justification, for example, ‘Being state sponsored, the plays had a strong didactic element’ (2). Hanna Roisman states confidently, ‘The plays were produced before huge audiences of between 15,000 and 20,000 spectators’ (3), although it has been argued that audiences in the Theatre of Dionysus were little more than a third of that. There is a brief discussion of the complex mythological background and of the dramatic treatments of the story by Aeschylus and Euripides, suggesting that Sophocles’ play preceded Euripides’ and rightly stressing that both were reacting to Aeschylus. Roisman’s interpretation of the play itself focusses on its political dimension, which has been the subject of much recent discussion: ‘Sophocles suggests that to attain their idealistic goals, the avengers must act as political beings, with all the moral shortcomings of politicians’ (11). This is a version of the ‘just but ugly’ view of the revenge, which is plausible enough in itself although students might have benefited from a clearer guide to rival interpretations. The introduction concludes with some useful remarks on the significance of the royal palace before which the play is set, rightly stressing the thematic contrast between inside and outside. There is a brief account of metre and prosody in the introduction, although criticism of Roisman’s treatment of metre in an earlier book is also relevant to this one: ‘The introduction to iambic trimeters … fails to mention caesura and confuses line-end brevis in longo with syllaba anceps’ (Martin Cropp, BMCR 2011.08.28). All the lyric passages are scanned in an appendix, but merely adding a name to each line (for example, ‘choriambic hendecasyllable OR asclepiadean’ for 472 ∼ 489) does not really amount to a ‘metrical analysis’. An idiosyncratic feature of the book is an appendix giving a lexical analysis, with statistics for each section of words occurring only once in the play and of words occurring only once in the extant Sophoclean corpus (rather curiously excluding fragments).

There are a few misprints, including some in the glossary and in the table of irregular verbs, which might confuse readers. The book is very sturdy, and made to sustain heavy use.