Euripides’ Children of Heracles is ‘an unusually action-packed, fast-paced play. In recounting the fortunes of Heracles’ family after his death, Euripides gives us a pitiful refugee tableau, a sudden and sacrilegious attack, an unexpected rescue, a divine demand for human sacrifice, a willing victim, a pseudo-comic scene, a battle narrative, a miraculous rejuvenation and a vicious triumph – all in just over a thousand lines. With every scene Euripides suggests a new direction for the play, only to turn us around again in the next’ (p. 1). So begins Y.'s welcome contribution to Bloomsbury's series of Companions to Greek and Roman Tragedy. The second sentence just quoted looks ahead to a distinctive feature of her book, the particularly close attention she pays to the playwright's manipulation of the expectations and responses of experienced spectators. In a section of the first chapter on ‘Audience anticipations’ (pp. 2–5) she discusses what spectators who attended the first performance of the play would have known or guessed about it before it began. Then, during a scene-by-scene analysis, she pauses six times for separately headed descriptions of ‘probable expectations established’. The play's ending has divided critics and receives a somewhat lengthier treatment. Having been captured and spared during an off-stage battle, Eurystheus, the persecutor of Heracles and his family, is brought on stage. Alcmene taunts him and relishes the thought that he will die disgracefully, but Hyllus’ herald (as Y. calls the character others identify as a servant or soldier: see further below) informs her that the Athenian leaders have decreed that, as a prisoner of war, Eurystheus is not to be executed. After Eurystheus speaks and Alcmene persists in her desire to kill him, the chorus first advise her against it, then abruptly acquiesce. In the past, many scholars judged the text corrupt or lacunose, but Y. joins most recent editors in accepting it as transmitted, concluding that ‘the evidence for a missing scene is circumstantial at best’ (p. 18).

Accordingly, one of the tasks of Chapter 2, ‘Summing the Parts’, is to include the shocking ending in efforts to make sense of the play as a whole. Y. presents three interpretative frameworks, each built around ‘a different focal point – the Heraclids themselves, their relationship with Athens, the expectations of an experienced audience’ (p. 19). These correspond to the headings of separate sections that offer appealing, level-headed interpretations of the play's major characters and themes. Presented as somewhat provisional and not mutually exclusive, these views are developed and refined in later chapters. Here and throughout the book, the virtues of Y.'s style include directness and, in keeping with the aims of the series, accessibility.

Y. is the author of The Uses of Anonymous Characters in Greek Tragedy (2012), and nameless figures get their due in Chapter 4, but first Chapter 3 takes an interesting turn with a study of absent characters. Much as Y. argued in her earlier book that anonymous figures function almost exclusively as supports for the tragedians’ characterisation of named heroes and heroines, she argues here that absent named characters mainly structure spectators’ expectations and understanding of the play unfolding before them. The most prominent absentee, of course, is Heracles. The presentation of his comrade Iolaus, mother Alcmene and children – especially the unnamed daughter who volunteers to be sacrificed in order to secure the Athenians’ and her siblings’ military victory over the Argives – is shaped at every turn by the absent hero. Y. makes further good use of this model to describe the effects of the absent Theseus and Hyllus and, cleverly, even Eurystheus, who is ‘absent’ only in the sense that the feeble, submissive prisoner who arrives near the end of the play differs markedly from the character we have been led to expect – the one constructed by poetic precedent, second-hand accounts preceding his entrance and above all the early scenes involving his herald.

Eurystheus’ herald is among the marginal and relatively powerless characters studied in Chapter 4. As Y. puts it, ‘In the absence of the conventionally powerful, the spotlight falls on the conventionally peripheral’ (p. 61). He is joined by ‘refugees and suppliants’, ‘the prisoner of war’, ‘the human sacrifice’, ‘children and old men’ and ‘women’. There is no section on the unfree. Y. does not assign the penestes of Hyllus to this category; whereas he is usually called ‘servant’ or the like, Y. identifies him as a herald, as she has argued previously (CQ 65 [2015], 51–9). As for the slave who plays the role of ‘messenger’ (784–891), Y. comments briefly in Chapter 2 on the possible significance of Alcmene's promise to free him as an anticipation of ‘her explicit and unsettling overreaching of authority in the final scene’ (pp. 23–4). Here she only mentions him in passing, while making a good case that the play as a whole is very much concerned with ‘the power of the weak’ and that this can be a source of its ability to engage spectators in our own times.

The final chapter begins with a discussion of possible dates and historical contexts for the play's first performance, a topic Y. deliberately postpones to late in the book because past scholars’ emphasis on one Peloponnesian War context or another, and thus on one or another constellation of enmities and alliances among Athenians, Argives and Spartans (who claimed the Heraclids as their ancestors), has so often guided – or distorted – their interpretations. Resolutely agnostic, Y. argues that ‘context-specific readings are extremely rich for this play – so rich that they cannot be used to narrow down the possible dates’, adding that ‘fortunately, the play does not depend on its initial performance context for its power’ (p. 96). She then discusses the possible early reception of the play reflected in scenes painted on two Lucanian vases from around the end of the fifth century bce, the first of three contexts of re-performance and adaptation she considers. The second is the eighteenth century, when the play was extensively rewritten as romance by two (or perhaps three) French playwrights writing for the Comédie Française and an English one writing for David Garrick and the Drury Lane Theatre. These not very successful productions essentially exhaust the resources of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD) on Children of Heracles until the twentieth century, when the play was produced in Greece under Nazi occupation in 1943 and again under ‘the Colonels’ in 1971 and 1972. Y. briefly explores the interesting fact that these adaptations were both performed under repressive regimes before turning to the early twenty-first century, which has seen at least three productions intended for large audiences. Naturally enough, these recent productions have aimed to resonate with various contemporary refugee crises. Finally, Y. takes up ‘Children of Heracles in the hands of scholars’ (‘the most specialized and the most devoted of Euripides’ audiences’), outlining a critical history of neglect followed by condemnation followed by defensiveness. Only in the last decade, she suggests, has scholars’ treatment of the play become ‘increasingly even-handed’, so that they avoid the trap of allowing ‘the earlier negative assessment … to colour their own readings by opening with an overview of increasingly outdated judgments’ (p. 112). It was a matter of principle, then, for Y. to put off this sad tale until the closing page and a half of her main text. A brief appendix on fragments sometimes attributed to Children of Heracles (but not recently, and not by Y.), a ‘selected chronology’ of editions, translations, productions and commentaries, and a guide to further reading round out the book. With this earnest and well-executed plea for readers and theatre-goers to appreciate this relatively neglected play for what it has to offer rather than succumb to the weight of a long, but receding, history of negative critical reception, Y. fulfils the aims of a Bloomsbury Companion admirably.