The title of this study defines its scope. As G. explains in the introduction, by ‘children’ she understands infants and juveniles. By ‘in’ she understands children who actually appear on stage, whether as mute or speaking characters. By ‘Greek tragedy’ she understands the extant plays. The subtitle distils G.'s thesis into three words. Whereas previous discussions of children in tragedy have concentrated on their ‘emotional affective power, often described as “pathos”’ (p. 24), a power that scholars too readily assume is timeless and universal, G. finds their significance in ‘superposition’, a term derived from quantum physics. Just as ‘the speed and position of a particle cannot both be known together on the quantum level’ (p. 7), so the ultimate destiny of the children who appear on the tragic stage is not fixed; they are characters for whom adults can envision ‘multiple future roles’ (p. 3). G. appears to have adopted this term to emphasise the seriousness of her topic; research on children, she maintains, tends to be undervalued or trivialised by critics. I am not sure that this situation still prevails – as G. notes, recent decades have brought new evidence on ancient childhood as well as fresh interpretations – or that it is advantageous to borrow a metaphor from quantum physics; Einstein, after all, is supposed to have quipped that splitting the atom was child's play, compared to child's play. In practice, though, G. treats ‘superposition’ as equivalent to the more readily understandable ‘potential’.

After an introduction that lays out definitions and surveys the scholarly context, G. devotes her second chapter to staging issues. There is no consensus on whether child actors were assigned speaking parts in the fifth century bc; some scholars believe that adult actors assumed their roles or that children appeared on stage but remained mute while adults delivered their lines. G. astutely observes that the tragic texts incorporate directions that could be readily followed by child actors (for example, Megara's instruction to her sons at Eur. Her. 520–1 to catch hold of Herakles’ robes), whereas adults’ accounts of children's offstage activities (for example, Megara's account at Eur. Her. 77–9 of how the boys dashed repeatedly to the palace gates in their eagerness for their father's return) involve more complex and unrestrained movement. It was not social restrictions on actual children, G. concludes, that governed their fictional counterparts’ onstage behaviour; there is no warrant for assuming that ‘the movements of children were rigorously controlled in fifth-century Athens as a whole’ (p. 52). Rather, the tragic texts reflect the directorial challenge of working with young actors, and cue simple activities that a child could be expected to carry out while remaining ‘under the strict control of an adult’ (p. 63).

G.'s analysis should put to rest any doubt that child actors appeared on the fifth-century stage. She builds on her important insight by suggesting how their embodiment affected audience response: ‘[T]he status of “child” as manifested in the physical body became merged in the overlap between actor and character, and thus the child actor was more closely identified with the role he played than was an adult actor with his role’ (p. 87). Whether the practice of bringing child actors on stage equated to a heightened voice for children in fifth-century Athens, as she goes on to suggest, seems less certain. Nor am I convinced that the boy's monody in Alkestis is a pastiche or parody of conventional children's laments that can be explained with reference to the play's contested genre. While some scholars view the play as less than fully tragic because it took the place of a satyr play in Euripides’ tetralogy of 438 bc, it is going too far to say that Alkestis ‘was the satyr play’ (p. 241) for that production, and in any case it is comedy, not satyr play, that specialises in parodies of tragedy. The anomalies of the children's role in Alkestis are not all that different from the norms identified by G., and they can be explained as variants that link the children's presence at their mother's deathbed to other motifs of the play.

Having established the onstage presence of child characters, in Chapter 3 G. discusses their identity from a temporal perspective. Although children manifest themselves in the dramatic present as appealing, innocuous figures, when they step on stage, they bring their heritage with them, and their parents’ enemies have reason to fear that, once grown to adulthood, they will dedicate themselves to avenging familial wrongs. Thus ‘children could be “double-counted” as dramatic figures, and the dangerous future adult (as avenger/murderer/hero, etc.) has a shadowy onstage presence alongside the apparently vulnerable, helpless child … This gives children a greater role as dramatic figures than has generally been accepted’ (p. 139). If in fact, however, the children's destiny is already fixed (as is most often the case both in tragedy and in tragedy's mythological substratum), then any potential that is ascribed to them exists in the minds of the adult characters rather than in the children themselves. Accordingly, they may interest the dramatist less in their own right than as a way of drawing attention to adult hopes and fears.

Chapter 4 recalibrates pathos in light of the preceding investigation of children's tragic identity. For G. the contrast between children's present vulnerability and their future menace drives their characterisation; accordingly, pathos, while still a significant element in the audience's response, resides elsewhere than in the children's diminutive stature, captivating appearance or guileless speech. For children in Greek tragedy who are either killed or in danger of being killed ‘the strongest element creating pathos [is] contemplation of their lost future’ (p. 199). This observation rings true for Medea's children or Herakles’, but a fifth-century audience might have responded differently to Alkestis’ son and daughter or to Ajax's son Eurysakes in Sophocles’ Ajax. The spectators presumably understood that these particular children still possessed a viable future: despite having lost a parent, they were not in danger of forfeiting their lives or even their social standing. If a child actor's physical embodiment encouraged an unusually close identification with the character he played (as suggested by G. in Chapter 2), the visual spectacle of a small, stricken figure surrounded by grieving adults might still figure as the strongest element in the spectators’ emotional response. Indeed, such a response might not unreasonably be described as timeless and universal; there are modern parallels in the emotive force that is exerted by images of John F. Kennedy's children at their father's funeral or of Prince Harry at his mother's.

Chapter 5 briefly compares the three tragedians’ handling of children. Euripides deploys children in nine of his extant plays, whereas Sophocles introduces them in two and Aeschylus in none; unsurprisingly, it is Euripides who receives most attention here. G. rebuts insinuations of the dramatist's sentimentality and concludes that ‘[t]he link between Euripides and children … is more easily explained in terms of Euripides’ engagement with the philosophical climate of the time, and with questions of education, than with any specific issue of pathos or domestic focus’ (p. 250).

In the final chapter G. recommends further research on other age groups in tragedy (adolescents and the elderly) and other literary genres (epic, comedy, satyr play) in light of her approach. An appendix on the connotations of orphanos in tragedy, a bibliography (which should have been more exhaustively cross-checked with the footnotes) and a general index complete the volume.

The careful focus of G.'s monograph proves both a strength and a limitation. While she succeeds in giving new significance to children in Greek tragedy, she could have enriched her analysis by considering the vignettes of childish behaviour that emerge from adults’ reminiscences: for example, the old slave's story in Euripides’ Electra (573–4) of how Orestes got his scar, or Cadmus’ account in Bacchae (1320–2) of his grandson Pentheus’ childish bravado. Gnomic statements could provide additional material; for example, Deianeira's description (in Sophocles’ Trachiniae 144–8) of girlhood as a protected garden. Finally, the fragments of tragedy might repay scrutiny: what are the implications of G.'s approach, for example, for the role of the infant Opheltes in Euripides’ lost Hypsipyle? By inviting further exploration this study demonstrates its own potential.