No matter when in antiquity it arose, the selection of a core group of three from within the collection of seven (or nine) surviving plays of the Attic playwrights had an enormous impact on the spreading of those texts in schools and libraries as well as on the size of the related exegetical activity. This is why to gather all the extant explanations (ranging from lexical equivalents to fully-fledged stylistic or philosophical discussions) on a play of the so-called ‘Byzantine triad’ is a daunting task, particularly for the most popular tragedian, namely Euripides.

M. is to be congratulated on sifting over 50 medieval manuscripts (+ 2 papyri) in order to produce what is the closest possible approximation to a complete and reliable edition of the scholia to Euripides’ Orestes, integrating and superseding those by W. Dindorf (1863), E. Schwartz (1887) and L. De Faveri (2002). As he showed in his Preliminary Studies on the Scholia to Euripides (2017), partly building on the pioneering work of the late H.-C. Günther and primarily focusing on Orestes and Hecuba, such an edition must come to terms not only with the sheer number of codices, but also with their often puzzling palaeographical features (this is particularly true for the crucial MSS M and V) and the inherent difficulty in dating the scholia and glosses carried by each. Hence, M.’s intention to edit all the – largely so far unpublished – material (as opposed to Schwartz, who selected only the scholia vetera and omitted the glosses) and to tag every scholium and every gloss as either ‘vet(us)’ or ‘rec(entior)’ or ‘p(a)l(eo)l(o)g(a)n’ or stemming from one named Byzantine erudite (Moschopulus, Magister, Triclinius) is an unprecedented tour de force and illuminates immensely the history of Euripidean exegesis from antiquity through the Middle Ages.

M. chose the digital format from the start, as witnessed by the fact that the present release, covering the entire play, was preceded by a beta-test in 2010 and by two partial ones in 2020 and in 2023 (all materials and revisions are archived on GitHub, also very valuable). On the technical level things have been wisely kept as easy as possible: the collations were made in .rtf; the XML file, encoded according to the TEI P5 standard, was produced using Oxygen XML Editor; and the final HTML5 file available on the website was produced through the eXtensible Stylesheet Language. The basic nature and flexibility of this digital format will hopefully secure the edition a long life not only on euripidesscholia.org (a site owned and run by M.), but also on the Pressbooks (https://berkeley.pressbooks.pub/scholia/) platform of Berkeley University Press, where the PDF files of Release 1 and 2 can be downloaded for free (soon – it is announced – the same will be the case for Release 3).

Yet this choice of sobriety – motivated by the fact that this is ‘essentially a solo project’, and the solitary editor wished more of his time to go into the study and transcription of manuscripts than into the tagging and encoding of files – naturally entails that the final result looks pretty much like a printed text. No markup of words or phrases has been undertaken, which means that, for example, there is no hypertextual link from words of the poetic text to the corresponding glosses or scholia, nor (more importantly) is there any link from words in the text of the scholia to the respective variant readings in the apparatus criticus – this would have been particularly helpful in the longer scholia. No tagging of the manuscript witnesses has been undertaken, so that one has to look up the sigla in the Conspectus siglorum just as one would do in a printed edition; the idea of having for each scholium a direct link to the image of the manuscript preserving it is beyond imagination – this is the case in what is perhaps the most advanced example of a digital edition of erudite material, the Hamburg project (https://www.etymologika.uni-hamburg.de/ressourcen.html) on the Etymologicum Gudianum (where, however, the codex unicus greatly simplifies matters), and partly in other more complex digital editions of narrative works such as that of Manfredus Potentinus’ Vita Gerardi (https://web.unibas.it/bup/evt2/vitager/index.html#/readingTxt?d=text_Vita&s=frontediz&e=critical). Finally, no apparatus fontium et comparandorum is provided (although this is envisaged as a possible future development); hence there is no possibility of inserting a hypertextual reference to the text of similar glosses or of comparable exegesis in dictionaries, in other scholiastic corpora or in literary works in general (when comparanda are given, e.g. ‘cf. Suda’, the link leads to the bibliographical data of A. Adler’s edition) – yet it is all but certain that users of this edition will have the skill and knowledge to identify the appropriate comparanda on their own.

To be sure, the digital format enables the editor to present a sequence of a sometimes startling number of glosses to the same word, which gives a full picture of the many different ways in which a poetic term has been understood or ‘translated’ throughout the centuries into ‘everyday’ Greek. Just as for the longer scholia, a lot of interesting details on each gloss are provided (the position on the manuscript page, the presence or absence of lemmata or reference signs, the inclusion in or exclusion from previous editions, the likely dating), all of which would have hardly found their place if – as is customary in printed editions of this kind – the glosses had been simply juxtaposed and accumulated next to each other on the same line. And the size of a volume including all this data would have been considerable.

Yet the result is that in a vast majority of scholia the only words one can click on are (if at all) the bibliographical abbreviations referring readers to the list of previous editions or modern scholarship. The longer scholia are separated from their apparatus criticus by the English translation, which is very welcome (and always reliable, from such a connoisseur of erudite terminology as M.), occasionally also by comments bearing on the textual or interpretative aspect of the scholium. Although these elements can be removed by choosing the appropriate line from the ‘Details to display’ menu, it is still sometimes difficult or impossible to visualise simultaneously on the same screen both the text of the scholium and the apparatus that refers to it (the issue is further complicated by the fact that the numbers in the apparatus do not refer to text lines but to pericopae marked by the editor): this makes finding words at times challenging and consultation sometimes more difficult than it would be in a printed volume.

Scrolling down the large number of scholia and glosses to each line is a fascinating experience, and this gives a flavour of the manifold reception paths followed by Euripides’ masterpiece throughout the ages. Yet it is undeniable that, after reading eleven glosses to Or. 789 δηλαδή – each constituting in this edition a single scholium, and each equipped with an apparatus of its own –, it proves problematic to gain a bird’s-eye view of the end of the stichomythy between Orestes and Pylades (ll. 734–98) and of its exegesis. A printed edition like those produced for non-triadic plays (Hippolytus, Andromacha, Alcestis) by J. Cavarzeran for the Sammlung griechischer und lateinischer Grammatiker meets this need much better, although admittedly the material in those plays is far less bulky than in the case of Orestes.

Since the largest part of the texts edited by M. belong (both in terms of manuscript witnesses and in terms of origin) to the Byzantine age, perhaps the most useful resource offered is the button enabling one to select which typology of scholia to visualise. With synoptic editions of scholia in printed volumes (like mine for the Odyssey or N.G. Wilson’s for Aristophanes’ Acharnians), it is hard to sort out page by page the exegetical material going back to the same age, milieu or kind – and when the material is sizeable (as e.g. in the case of Aristophanes’ Clouds or Sophocles’ Oedipus the King or Pindar), one understands why the various editors (W.J.W. Koster and D Holwerda; P.N. Papageorgios and O. Longo; A.B. Drachmann and E. Abel) chose to publish it in separate volumes, thus forcing readers interested in the exegesis to a given line to flip through two or three different books. Here everything is available at once, and one click is enough to single out only the scholia (and/or the glosses) that certainly stem from antiquity or from the Palaeologan age or from Demetrius Triclinius: the tagging thus enables readers to unravel at a glance the different layers of exegesis that have landed on the margins of medieval manuscripts – and this on a fully free website.

The digital medium would no doubt allow more sophisticated outputs, but it is to be hoped that M.’s unceasing dedication and skill will soon provide similar editions of the scholia to both the other triadic plays. While the printed format will never prove entirely outdated or superfluous, this open-access tool represents an invaluable resource for researchers worldwide.