One would have thought that, after producing a text of the complete surviving works of Euripides (the monumental Loeb edition) and writing many articles and volumes on the textual editing of Euripides, K. at this point might be done with the subject, but, clearly, he is not. While I have some misgivings about the general thrust of parts of the introduction and wonder about the volume's intended audience, this commentary on Euripides’ Troades is a welcome scholarly achievement.

K. has not rested on his laurels as an editor. It has been 25 years since the Loeb volumes began appearing and 20 years since Volume 4, which included what was there called Trojan Women. K. has built on J. Diggle's 1981 OCT, but has differed from it in what he observes are 100 places, with some of the departures already in the earlier Loeb (p. vi). In the first footnote, he lists the line numbers in the commentary where we will find discussions of his differences with Diggle. I would have found helpful a clear, schematic list of not just the changes from Diggle's text but also where K. has changed his mind on the text of Troades. Indeed, I admire scholars who change their mind in public like this, and he also does so with some stage directions, such as correcting his Loeb stage direction of Hecuba getting up at line 143.

The introduction covers what one would expect and does so generally quite well, which is not surprising as it in part reprises materials from several decades of K.’s published work. After dealing with the play's production year and the history of attempts by modern scholars to link Troades to the destruction of Melos (more on that in a moment), K. explores staging, the Euripidean trilogy of 415 bce, a broader interpretation of the play, the manuscript tradition and – very briefly – the reception of Troades. The comments on staging are quite sensible and straightforward. The section on the place of Troades within a trilogy (along with the lost Alexandros and Palamedes) is extremely useful for anyone working on Greek tragic drama. K., deploying the skills and judgement that have made him such a fine textual editor, carefully marshals the arguments for a connected trilogy, laying out in persuasive detail the evidence for the two lost plays and their thematic integrity with Troades. This approach makes his own focus on the major themes of Troades all the more compelling.

The interpretative section loops back to his refutation of attempts to link Troades to the destruction of Melos, and while I largely agree with his criticisms of such work, I would find fault with their tone and resistance to finding any relation between this play and the Peloponnesian War. By this point a fair amount of space has already been devoted to the refutation of the Melos connection, as well as any thoughts of the Sicilian expedition, but then K. suddenly returns to the matter to close out the section (pp. 58–9), featuring some rather testy comments thrown in the direction of P. Burian. I do not find that these comments belong in a commentary, and the attention to the Melos question starts to seem a bit obsessive. Indeed, multiple pages of the commentary return to Melos, as well as an entire appendix (pp. 335–42). I, and most people working on Greek tragedy now, accept that the destruction of Melos occurred too soon before the production of Troades for it to have been Euripides’ primary concern and that the play is unlikely to have been mainly intended as an angry denunciation of Athenian military conduct.

That said, it is completely another thing to posit, as K. does here, that a play, composed in the fifteenth year of the Peloponnesian War, that is about the wartime destruction of a city, has little to do with the world Euripides and his audience were inhabiting. This is, to me, simply not credible. Yes, one of the main themes of the play is the vicissitudes of human fortune, and the play does represent the gods destroying Troy in response to the errors of its rulers (and about to destroy the Greeks because of Greek misconduct), but there are productive ways to approach Troades that lie in between the discussion of those themes and arguing that Euripides was some kind of alienated pacifist. In other words, ‘the two views of the play’ articulated by K. are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Could not Euripides have been trying to provoke discussion instead of attacking policy, using his play as a site for the clash of contesting values? One looks in vain during this discussion for some engagement with the approach to Athenian tragedy that has been so effective over the past quarter century, that has grounded the texts in their contexts of festival and polis, as seen in such seminal volumes as Nothing to Do with Dionysos? (1990, edd. J. Winkler and F. Zeitlin) and The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy (1997, ed. P.E. Easterling). Neither of these volumes are in the bibliography, where the name Easterling is absent and S. Goldhill only appears for his early Reading Greek Tragedy.

I linger a bit over the bibliography, as it contains a number of items that I did not see cited, and those items are a bit of a grab-bag. For example, I was very surprised to see N. Rabinowitz's introductory volume Greek Tragedy (2008), not because of any shortcomings in it, but because its author's approach in general is antithetical to K.’s. The inclusion seems a bit gratuitous, as feminist approaches to Greek tragedy and Troades are largely excluded from this commentary. Similarly, M. Alexiou's groundbreaking The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (1974) is listed, but I cannot find it cited or discussed in the commentary on the laments of Hecuba and Andromache. Indeed, there is no entry for ‘lament’ in the index, nor is there one for ‘wedding’. I had expected to see R. Seaford's well-known article on this subject (‘The Tragic Wedding’, JHS 107 [1987], 106–30) cited in the discussion of Cassandra's excitement about her union with Agamemnon, but Seaford's name does not appear in the bibliography. Such names as Zeitlin, H. Foley, C. Sourvinou-Inwood and C.P. Segal are similarly absent. Perhaps there is simply some confusion about what the function of the bibliography for this volume is, and some kind of set of ordering with subheadings and annotations might have been more effective. To my mind, one of the functions of a commentary on a single Greek tragedy is to open up its reader's knowledge to the fuller range of scholarly approaches not just to the play in question but to the subject as a whole; this play might be the only one the student reads in Greek, and the author has a duty to reflect the broad range of work in the field for the student's benefit. A commentary should open doors, not close them.

This brings me to concerns about the intended audience for this volume. The jacket blurb pronounces that it ‘is written with the needs of both comparative beginners and seasoned classical scholars in mind’. Maybe it is, but alongside notes that explain what any student would know after passing first-year Greek (e.g. the note on line 448 [p. 201] about adverbial καί), there is no attempt to introduce the basic terminology of Greek metre and, as a result, all such discussions are far over the head of the comparative beginner. There is also a tendency to opt for recondite language such as ‘anarthrous’ (pp. 147, 343); even graduate students I have taught would stumble there. I cannot remember the last time I saw Latin (as opposed to Latinate) grammatical terms such as regens (p. 209) and genetivus inhaerentiae (p. 255). At some points there are topics that could have used more discussion, such as the absence at the end of Troades of traditional closural mechanisms; that is mentioned on page 304, with a nod to F.M. Dunn's work (Tragedy's End: Closure and Innovation in Euripidean Drama [1996]), but the treatment feels inadequate.

The volume is not, alas, free of errors. These seem to occur mainly in the commentary section and are the type that really should have been caught early; for example ‘contruction’ (p. 139), ‘countrmen's’ (p. 163) and ‘Eur. Alt. 150–1’ (p. 200). I could find no errors in the introduction.