This book does not seek to offer a broad perspective on praise and blame in Greek tragedy. Instead, C. focuses tightly on six plays in which heroes seek but are denied a particular type of praise, and are occasionally threatened or afflicted with blame. The first three examples present male heroes who overtly value and seek praise, while the last three focus on female disruption of the praise more implicitly expected by and for male characters. Within this broader structure, each study is essentially discrete, with a clear and concise introduction and conclusion and every element of the argument carefully signposted by subheadings.
This is a familiar topic addressed through traditional close reading. I am sympathetic to this approach when the observations are sharp and fresh. At the level of detail, there is not much opportunity for originality as these topics in these texts have been scrutinised carefully, and C. conscientiously documents previous scholarship on almost every point of close reading. The value of the book lies rather in those case studies where C. suggests fresh readings, grounded in these familiar details, of the broader dynamics between characters’ use of praise language over the course of a play. These can in turn be set in conversation with other thematic interpretations, though this falls outside the scope of the book.
Not all of the studies are equally successful. The first two in particular struck me as offering a synthesis of existing interpretations rather than new readings. C. examines Sophocles’ engagement with the Iliadic search for kleos in both Philoctetes and Ajax; however, Neoptolemus’, Philoctetes’ and Ajax’ desire for praise according to an Achillean model is especially well-travelled ground, and the painstaking approach to uncontroversial material makes for slow reading. Nevertheless, these might be fine readings for undergraduate students because of the clarity and thoroughness of exposition.
The third case study argues that Euripides’ Heracles seeks but fails to add his defence of his family to the praise tradition focused on his labours, especially as represented in epinician poetry. As C. carefully acknowledges, neither the duality of Heracles’ identity in this play nor the importance of the epinician tradition to this tragedy is new; what she brings to the table is the interplay of these two well-recognised aspects of the play. She does overstate the case somewhat, arguing that Heracles fails to establish himself ‘as praiseworthy father’ specifically ‘as a result of the reactions of the chorus and characters around him’ (p. 70) – as though these reactions were more important than the central fact that Heracles murders his family. It is hardly sufficient to say that he goes to Athens ‘leav[ing] his uncelebrated family life behind him’ (p. 70). Yet it is a valuable observation that the hero's efforts to expand the terms of his praise discourse and the prominence of traditional praise language in his promised rehabilitation are significant aspects of his failed attempt to change his heroic identity.
The last three case studies focus on praise discourse in plays whose gendered dynamics are central to their interpretation: Euripides’ Suppliant Women, Trachiniae and Medea. C. argues that in the first of these Theseus does not receive the praise that long-standing ‘political’ interpretations of the play might lead us to expect, while the chorus’ notoriously problematic praise in their lament for the Seven subverts the larger discourses of praise that the male characters attempt to establish and has a troubling influence on other characters. Again, some elements of this argument have been much discussed, such as the unusual interventions of Aethra and the strange limitations on Adrastus’ eloquence. Some lines of argument are not well developed; for example, C. downplays the praise offered to Theseus as rhetorically instrumental, and therefore ‘limited’, but does not provide a discussion of how the motives of speakers are to be judged or of how they affect the value of praise, nor any contextualisation of this rhetoric within the broader conventions of supplication. Nor does C. consider whether the praise of the Seven in the context of lament might be considered equally ‘instrumental’. Nevertheless, she draws out a noteworthy contrast between the praise of Theseus in the first half of the play and the praise of the Seven in the second.
The fifth case study discusses Deianira's effect on Heracles’ kleos in Trachiniae, arguing that her destruction of his body mirrors her destruction of his reputation. This was my favourite chapter, as C. constructs her argument by successfully integrating three well-established aspects of the play that operate on different levels: the theme of the reliability of information, the interplay with lyric genres and the gendered character opposition between Deianira and Heracles. C. unites these elements in a satisfying way by tracing Deianira's influence on the praise discourse applied to Heracles.
The final case study focuses on Medea's management of Jason's reputation. Much of this draws on the material usually used to demonstrate Medea's appropriation of masculine heroic qualities, and there are few surprises here, but C. usefully highlights Medea's role in presenting Jason in terms of blame usually assigned to women.
What I missed throughout the book was a larger framework to connect the individual studies and to articulate more robustly the relationship between some of the major concepts invoked. The case studies are almost as independent as journal articles, and the two-page conclusion is a formality, summarising without synthesising the material covered. The introduction seeks only to establish that tragedy is an excellent vehicle for developing complex discourses of praise and blame, and offers a simple methodological section on identifying markers of these discourses. This provides a sufficient basis for the mechanics of the case studies, but the introduction does not engage with larger considerations (e.g. what praise and blame are; how they relate to associated concepts such as aidōs, and even kleos, which C. treats simply as a marker of praise discourse) or more nuanced methodological questions raised by the multivocality of the genre (e.g. how the characters claim authority to distribute praise and blame; how power dynamics affect these discourses). This results not only in a relatively simple approach in the case studies, but, more importantly, limits the scope of the book's argument.
The same limitation in scope is evident in C.'s use of other scholarship. A very good range of scholarly work is carefully cited in the notes; there are a few unfortunate omissions of recent works that the author may not have had the opportunity to consult (in particular S. Bocksberger, Telamonian Ajax [2022], which offers much on the construction of Ajax’ heroic identity before the fifth century). But throughout, C.'s engagement with scholarship is mostly restricted to the interpretation of individual passages. Detienne's 1967 study on archaic concepts of truth (translated as M. Detienne, The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece [1996]) is the most frequently invoked framework and accepted without discussion. Speech act theory – surely a valuable tool for a discussion of this kind – goes unmentioned, while recent scholarship on the complementary topics of memory and forgetting is absent.
The book is, I think, slightly greater than the sum of its case studies, but much of the work of addition is left to the reader.
