This is an immensely enjoyable book on Athenian tragedy, written in lyrical prose and elegiac mode. Throughout M. uses Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus as a guiding principle: literally, as the book is structured according to the parts of the play (parodos, episodes, exodus), but figuratively, too. For M. the OC captures and embodies all that is irrecoverable about Greek tragedy, and he returns to the play time and again as a symbol and repository of tragedy's secrets. Because this is a meditation on how inaccessible Athenian tragedy has become, a deep sense of loss permeates what is nevertheless a joyful celebration of mystery. The surviving scripts may seem to be complete works of ‘literature’ (the very notion of literature will be contested), but stripped of their contexts (geographical, performative, affective, theological) they are but artefacts and fragments. Oedipus at Colonus is thus a far cry from the perfectly balanced Ionic column that we make it out to be; rather it is ‘a ruin, a true ruin, just as ruined as the Parthenon is today’ (p. 42). M. conjures many such images, and even the most jaded philologist should find buoyancy in this impassioned tour through tragedy's secrets. Readers will doubtless find many points to disagree with, but as a whole this is an elegantly written review of important problems in the history of ‘tragic’ scholarship and an energising reminder that an entire, irretrievable world lies behind the words on the tragic page.

Each of the chapters begins with an in memoriam to a scholar with whose ideas M. is sympathetic: the first, ‘The Place’, is dedicated to Jebb. Here M. argues that Athenian tragedy was deeply rooted in topography and the numinous spirits of place (the kind with which visitors to modern-day Colonus find it difficult to commune). The places of Greek tragedy are palimpsests of the heroes and rituals that haunt them, and for the Panhellenic audiences gathered in the Theatre of Dionysus tragedy was in this respect a mirror of the world. But tragedies, in the form that they have survived, have become denuded of the particularities of place and context, which today we view only as nice exegetical supplements to the poetry. Regarded all too often as a purely ‘literary’ form, Attic tragedy is deracinated, just as ‘fragmentary’ (and just as alluring in its fragmentation) as the Nike of Samothrace. For a more accessible dramatic tradition similarly rooted in place, here defined in terms of both space and enunciative context, M. brings us to a piece of Japanese Noh which has many uncanny points of contact with the OC. The comparison is illuminating, and forces us to question the nature of the aesthetic responses that we feel in the face of our ‘orphaned’ scripts.

The book's subtitle (Pour une tragédie sans tragique) encapsulates the argument of the second chapter, ‘L'idée’ – the idea, that is, of the tragic. Stripped of its roots in real places, tragedy was freed for theoretical scaffolding: for abstractions and notions of universals. The ‘tragic’ is a more recent invention, an interesting but distorting prism through which our view of the ancient plays has long been skewed. Beginning with Aristotle, M. undertakes a dizzying review of philosophical conceptions of the ‘tragic’, winding his way through German Romanticism, where the idea of ‘theoretical’ tragedy came to eclipse any empirical experience of drama (thus effecting its déréalisation), to Nietzsche, Wilamowitz and their conflicting attempts to restore an emphasis upon Attic tragedy's historical conditions. The pace is breakneck, but the point is clear: modern notions of the ‘tragic’ have little to do with Greek tragedy. Unsurprisingly, M. here invokes the problem of the many Attic tragedies that end untragically: as real as their presence in the corpus may be, these plays are treated as uncomfortable exceptions to philosophical theories, which are the definitional equivalents of Procrustean beds. That the masterpieces best known today (Antigone, the OT, Medea, etc.) more neatly fit our modern idea of the tragic is a matter of circular reasoning, and the propensity of Euripides' ‘alphabetic’ plays to unnerve definitions only reflects the bias inherent in the ‘hand-selected’ plays.

In the third chapter, ‘Le Corps’, M. makes some of his most focused philological and ideological arguments. He heroically takes on the problem of the definition of catharsis in Aristotle's Poetics, and the attendant question of why spectacles that provoke pity and fear should also produce pleasure. On the basis of other Aristotelian passages (from the Rhetoric, the Politics and the Problems), M. concludes that Aristotelian catharsis occurs through the rebalancing of humours that a spectator experiences when watching a tragic play. Spectators are provoked to pity as they observe another's suffering, and to fear as they imagine themselves in the sufferers' shoes (a combination of reactions that can occur only in the presence of mimetic representation). Catharsis is, strictly speaking, psychosomatic, but this is difficult for us to grasp: today we regard literature as an abstract intellectual process that speaks to the mind but silences the body (only psychoanalysis recognises the relation between logos, body and mind). M. here performs an elegant balancing act between philological detail and philosophical abstraction: discussions of textual problems in the Poetics proceed hand in hand with reflections on what we have lost by denying our bodies a place in the experience of literature.

‘Le Dieu’ is the last chapter, and its organising principle is the lost theology of Greek tragedy (the OC in particular) and the winding course of interpretations that its mysterious divine and Dionysiac elements have taken. M. at first rejects readings of the OC as prefiguring Christ's suffering and the notion of Christian salvation, homing in on the play's obscure line 1583 and the question of whether Oedipus has ‘left’ or ‘obtained’ eternal life. But to give up entirely on the ‘religious’ element is to throw the baby out with the bath water, and M. goes on to dwell on the history of more Dionysiac interpretations of (the) tragedy, paying his required respects to, among others, the ‘Cambridge ritualists’. Given the title of the book, M. is naturally seduced by Ridgeway's theory of tragedy's origins in the lamentation and cult of heroes, located (and here we return to the importance of place) at the tomb. The OC presents an interesting problem: though a ritual evocation of the hero's last moments, its mystery and mysticism lie in the very absence of the tomb. In these last pages M. is at his most adventurous, venturing that, with the OC, Sophocles was urging his colleagues – who had ‘deritualised’ their medium and its chorus – to return to the cult of heroes and to re-reconcile ritual and drama. At this point he also cannot resist bending to some of the ideas that he has painstakingly deconstructed. His reading now verges towards prefiguration of the Christian mass, just as the totalising view that he outlines retraces our steps to a view of tragedy centred on death and – dare we say it? – the ‘tragic’.

There is an honesty to M.'s aporia, and in it another reaffirmation of loss. The framing device of the OC is effective; it provides a landscape for mapping the ineffable enigmas of tragedy, and in M.'s hands the (missing) tomb of Oedipus becomes an unusually productive metaphor. Sophocles' posthumously-produced masterpiece is, for M., Attic tragedy's own tomb, and though impossible to locate precisely we can be reassured by its very presence. The book ends in promise rather than despair: the Parthenon, the Nike of Samothrace, the Venus de Milo are all beautiful and provocative in their fragmentation; to regard even the ‘surviving’ tragedies as ruins changes only the nature of their power. M.'s work is a tour de force explication of the inexplicable, and a poetic declaration that what cannot be grasped still can and should be felt.