In the Preface to his Aris & Phillips bilingual edition and commentary published in 2000, Martin Cropp could write that Iphigenia in Tauris had been ‘less studied in recent times than almost any other extant tragedy’ and ‘less well served than most by commentaries’. His was the first in a series of works that have changed that picture dramatically. To the large-scale commentaries of Poulheria Kyriakou (2006), Laetitia Parker (2016) and Christine and Luc Amiech (2017), Emily Kearns now adds her entry in the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics (‘green and yellow’) series, which appeared at nearly the same time as Cropp’s enlarged second edition. IT is now among the best served of Euripides’ plays.

In its proportions, Kearns’ book resembles others in the series, with the notable exception of an unusually detailed apparatus criticus, on which more below. The Introduction covers the basics efficiently and includes appealing sections devoted to subjects like aetiology, ethnography and geography and human sacrifice. A section headed ‘Non-“tragic” tragedy, “escape tragedy”’ situates IT among similar, near-contemporary plays like Ion, Andromeda and especially Helen. There is a fine, up-to-date section on ‘Reception from Antiquity to the Present’. In the back of the book, there is a helpful glossary of technical terms preceding bibliography and indices.

Already before the flood of new commentaries, the text of IT had benefited from recent critical editions and studies by David Sansone (Leipzig 1981), James Diggle (Oxford 1981) and David Kovacs (Cambridge MA 1999). (A revised edition of the second volume of Diggle’s OCT is expected imminently.) Kearns thus enjoys an embarrassment of riches when it comes to constituting her text, and it is clear that she has worked very hard at it. She starts from the codex unicus L, whose readings she occasionally reports even on minor points like orthography and accentuation, and even when the alterations she accepts into her text follow long-established conventions. Of course, what is conventional is not always unquestionably correct. A change in the accent of a compound adjective in line 1137 marks the only time, unless something escaped me, that Kearns claims to be the originator of a textual improvement. (L has the accent where she puts it on the same word in 1427, where editors are in the habit of changing it; for Kearns’ preferred form, which she herself does not discuss, see Donald Mastronarde on Phoenissae 1712–13 (Cambridge 1994).) She has trawled through older editions and thought carefully about what she found there. She does not depend disproportionately on any one of her more recent predecessors, although she records that she found Parker’s edition invaluable in the revision of her own. All this effort stirs mixed feelings. Industry and independent judgement are admirable, but the series format limits the extent of text-critical argument. Kearns does not really identify her intended readership, some of whom may not have much use for her expanded apparatus, and those who do will still have to look elsewhere for detailed discussion.

The commentary is more typical of the series, with sensitive and intelligent notes aimed primarily at literary and cultural appreciation. On the literary side, Kearns offers enlightened paraphrase and exegesis, often with a distinctly unfussy quantity of documentation in parallel passages and modern scholarship, and there is much comment on the narrative and dramatic strategies of the text, often unburdened by any secondary reference at all. But she scrupulously cites where citation is needed. To give just one example, Kearns is quite open to metatheatrical interpretation, and she cites relevant work by scholars like Isabelle Torrance and Fabian Meinel to good effect. On the cultural side, she is especially good, as one would expect from the work for which she is best known, on religion and cult, both realia and mentalities. Other areas in which she makes good use of recent scholarship are music, chorality and Black Sea area studies.

Finally, a small observation. When discussing mythical human sacrifice in her Introduction (34–37), Kearns comments on most of the usual comparanda, but not Phrixus. There is plenty of room for debate about how the sacrifice motif was handled in Euripides’ two Phrixus plays, but scholia on Aristophanes’ Clouds and other testimonia (TrGF iv.99–100) make it clear that in Sophocles’ Athamas, Phrixus was believed by those he left behind actually to have been killed, despite his escape to Colchis on the back of the ram with the Golden Fleece. It is only the revelation by Heracles ex machina that Phrixus is still alive that saves Athamas from becoming another sacrificial victim. Iphigenia, then, is not the only figure in Greek myth who goes on living in a far-off land following a ritual killing that seemed real, though in fact it was averted at the last minute.