This compact study interprets a trio of suppliant tragedies set in Attica (Eumenides, Heracleidae and Oedipus at Colonus), and explores the different ways in which they articulate and question Athenian ideology in the years 458–406. Important comparisons with funeral oration are made, although suppliant-drama, for a variety of reasons, is not subject to that genre's limitations and employs different topoi. Beginning from the uncontroversial premise that suppliant-drama is inherently political, T. argues that Athens' role as the tragic destination par excellence for oppressed foreigners reflects its self-representation as the just, moral and powerful leader of a coalition of willing allies. With one eye attuned to history and the Athenian struggle to maintain the empire in a time of war, the study is admirably receptive to nuance in the plays, but the historical narrative is occasionally distortive, putting the plays and their analyses to the service of events and concerns beyond their dramatic scope.

Although the first chapter's overarching theme is the legitimacy of Athenian hegemony in Greece as broadcasted in Eumenides, the double reception of Orestes and the Furies calls attention as much to domestic as to the foreign policy elements of that ideology. T. is not content to limit the analysis to familiar points: while judicial machinery and the military alliance with Argos are key to the play's representation of Athens' openness and just treatment of foreign refugees, the chapter considers the Furies as well, who are no less foreign, polluted or marginalised than Orestes. Cast out from Delphi (and, indeed, from the divine community as a whole), they are provided a home in Athens and integrated into the polis' cultic life, an incorporation which T. neatly emphasises in remarking that the shrine of the Semnai established in the play was the historical destination for refugees fleeing persecution (p. 62). The Athens of Eumenides is just, receptive and protective: she acts with a view to mutual advantage and her generosity is backed up by both divine support and military might.

The analysis of Heracleidae is the strength of the book, demonstrating with compelling clarity how Athens' role as defender and liberator of the oppressed is a burden in the early years of the Peloponnesian War, and how the costs of empire must be borne by the coalition of the willing as well. Into the dialectic of compulsion and willingness T. weaves the sacrifice of Heracles' daughter, arguing that this female saviour reflects the historical contributions of the foreign and non-Athenian allies to the war effort. Analysed in the light of Euripides' fragmentary Erechtheus and the genre of funeral oration, her sex becomes particularly important: before an Athenian audience that in the years following 451 viewed women as indispensable contributors to the civic life from which they were for the most part barred, Heracles' daughter, like the Praxithea of Erechtheus, adopts the trappings of the heroic soldier and ‘inverts not only the boundaries between male and female acts of heroism but also those between Athenian and non-Athenian and between citizen and non-citizen’ (p. 96). Athens remains hegemonic and just, but mutual benefit requires enjoinder upon the suppliants as well.

Where the discussion of Heracleidae is invigorated by historical considerations, the final chapter on Oedipus at Colonus falls short of demonstrating the crisis in Athenian hegemony which is its goal. Were it not for the play's probable composition in the last decade of the fifth century (ominous for those with the benefit of hindsight into the end of the Peloponnesian War), I doubt the play would invite such an interpretation: Sophocles is no Thucydides. The argument hinges on the supposed difficulty Oedipus has in obtaining sanctuary at Colonus. Thus, the hostility of his initial encounters with the stranger and chorus, and the scrutiny to which he is subjected reflect negatively on Athens (pp. 107–10): subsequently, the argument dismisses the praise Theseus earns following Creon's attempt at forcible extraction (pp. 118–19). But the latter point goes unsupported, and the former misreads the early portion of the play. It is true that the chorus is hostile once it learns the trespasser's identity (220), but it has no real authority in the matter. As both the stranger (66–9) and the chorus (294–5) confess, Theseus is sovereign of the land – not the people. And the king's reception of Oedipus could not be warmer: he enters speaking of pity (556), considers the favour Oedipus requests a small one (586) and receives him in both ritual and political terms (631–7). The fulfilment of his obligations to Oedipus from this point is exhaustive and faultless. If the play dramatises or implies a crisis in Athenian hegemony, let alone one at all reflective of historical events, I struggle to identify it.

The larger, historicising bent of the argument is probably responsible for a few other curious assertions. To emphasise how Athens' reception of tragic suppliants reveals self-interest as much as it produces a mutually advantageous outcome, for example, the study claims that Athenian kings in tragedy negotiate shrewdly with their suppliants (p. 15). But while this is true in Heracleidae, it is not so in O.C. (and certainly not in Medea), and the claim that kings such as the Pelasgus of Suppliants fall short of Athenian magnanimity is a bit unfair: the threats (and subsequent incorporation) of Aeschylus' Danaids, after all, are not dissimilar to those of his Furies. In rough outline, the Atheno-centric and historicising framework makes sense, but the demands of a framework imported from an analysis of fifth-century history are rigid. The so-called ‘crisis’ in O.C. is one ill-fitting example, but the interpretation of Eumenides, which finds in that play a programmatic articulation of hegemonic Athenian ideology vis-à-vis Sparta, is not without outlying details either. Important historical events of domestic concern in the Athens of the day – the murder of Ephialtes and factional strife between democrats and aristocrats over Cimon and the Areopagus, for example – are largely downplayed until the end of the chapter (p. 65; see also n. 16 on p. 141). Similarly, the threat of force with which Athena attempts to corral the Furies is brought up only inasmuch as it ‘contravenes the idealized depiction of Athena's leadership and in turn allows a more complex picture of the Athenian panegyric to emerge’ (p. 65). However convincing the account of Athenian ideological posturing vis-à-vis Sparta may be, the consideration of the domestic historical issues which no less animate the play disappoints and undercuts the rest of the chapter.

Such criticisms pay tribute to the many stimulating analyses that proliferate through the book: were this critic not regularly intrigued, they would not arise. T.'s study will prove indispensable for future work on the relationship between Athenian ideology and tragic poetry.