Scholars investigating the ancient scholia to Sophocles have long been limited to dated critical editions. The scholia to Ajax, Oedipus at Colonus and Philoctetes have received editions within the last century (edited respectively by G.A. Christodoulou [1977], V. de Marco [1952] and T. Janz [2004] in an unpublished Oxford D.Phil. thesis), while, for the other plays, the latest edition available has long been P.N. Papageorgiou's 1888 omnibus edition. In recent years X. has produced welcome new editions for Sophocles’ Electra (2010), Women of Trachis (2010) and Oedipus at Colonus (2018). To these we can now add this most recent volume on the scholia to Antigone. Thorough, well-documented and with a focused editorial philosophy, X.'s latest edition happily follows the path laid out by the previous three volumes.

The text opens with a brief preface, where X. details his goals for this edition, namely, that he will ‘restore the scholia vetera to Antigone in their earliest recoverable version and corpus’ (p. v). Those who have not read X.'s earlier volumes will lack the full details of the methodology that undergirds this theoretical claim. This is unfortunate, as X. makes a powerful case in the introduction to his edition to the scholia to Electra for presenting a purely ‘Laurentian’ version, finally stating that to publish an edition with mixed versions would end in ‘creating a hybrid version and establishing a scholion which originated from nobody's conscious decision but the editor's; such an item never had any existence in the real world’ (2010, p. 22). A slightly more detailed introduction that elucidates the basics of his critical philosophy would be helpful for new readers or those interested in only the scholia in this volume. The omission is understandable, however, as it would be tedious to repeat this material in every new volume, with the introductions to the scholia to Women of Trachis and Oedipus at Colonus being similarly brief. Moreover, X. makes this omission clear in the preface and duly cites the relevant explanatory material from earlier volumes throughout this edition.

After the preface comes a description of the surviving manuscripts with scholia to Antigone and the data establishing the familial relations between them. Here, he follows the same model as in the earlier volumes, exhaustively cataloguing the conjunctive and disjunctive features that exist across the twelve manuscripts consulted. X. does not limit himself to evaluating the relationships between manuscripts, but also offers valuable insights on individual manuscripts discovered in this investigation, such as his conclusion that the extensive errors found in Lp militate against the conclusion of some palaeographers that its author was Marcus Musurus. This section concludes with a stemma codicum, differing from the one posited for the scholia to Electra, Trachiniae and Oedipus at Colonus only in the level of detail and evidence for contamination, given the different number of manuscripts with scholia for Antigone. The second half of the introduction provides supplementary material on Lascaris’ 1518 editio princeps of the scholia to Sophocles. X. uses this analysis of the scholia to Antigone to bolster the claim that Lascaris employed manuscripts T and Lp as secondary sources alongside his collation of L and offers additional evidence for Lascaris’ Atticising tendencies and the principles behind his tendency to omit matter from L. Such rich details make the introduction a valuable read even for those interested only in the contents of the scholia.

Now we come to the critical text. As in the other volumes, X. provides a freshly edited version of both the ancient scholia to Antigone and the surviving hypotheses to Sophocles’ plays. The hypotheses appear here in the same order as in most of the manuscripts and contain a set of critical apparatuses. X.'s inclusion of the hypotheses is sensible, given the similar natures and origins of the hypotheses and scholia, and it is welcome to see him subject these texts to the same level of textual scrutiny as the scholia. The critical text of the scholia immediately follows the hypotheses. Here, he marks each scholion with a line number and, where appropriate, a lemma. A clear set of rules in the introduction defines the provenance (ancient or modern) of these lemmata. The text of each note concludes with an indication of where on the manuscript the given scholion occurs (e.g. left margin, right margin, above the line etc.). Besides these additions, X. prints each scholion as a continuous text, with all mentions of manuscript and scholarly variants kept to the apparatus. This distinguishes his editions of scholia from, for example, the recent editions of the scholia to Aristophanes (1960–2007, Groningen), which put textual variants in parallel columns and print the names of manuscripts within the text to show where and how these variants occur. Each presentation has its merits, with the latter foregrounding the state of the evidence as we have it today, and the former presenting the text as it may have been. Furthermore, this presentation aligns with X.'s goal of presenting a purely Laurentian version of the scholia. The clarity of the scholia equals the exhaustiveness of the apparatuses. The first is an apparatus locorum similium, where X. provides ample documentation of the lexicographers, scholiasts and other authors who comment in similar ways to the Sophoclean scholiasts. One rich example occurs at Σ Ant. 15a, which references scholia to Homer, Oppian, Pindar, Thucydides and Sophocles along with the works of Apollonius Dyscolus, Photius, Hesychius and the Suda. This is a valuable resource for those searching out comparanda for scholarly habits across the works of ancient scholarship. The second apparatus is a standard apparatus criticus, though one that benefits from the same rigour and diligence that X. gives to every aspect of this edition. Together, these qualities create a text clear and easy to read for those interested in the contents of the scholia while also providing an abundance of details for those eager to delve into the complicated textual history of these notes.

The edition concludes with the following indexes: ancient authors cited, Greek words whose meaning or usage the scholia discuss, grammatical terms, rhetorical terms, matters pertaining to the stage or tragedy and proper names mentioned in the scholia. The inclusion of the last index, first found in X.'s edition to the scholia to Oedipus at Colonus, should prove helpful for those interested in the scholia's discussion of mythological matters. X. states in a footnote to the indexes of the first volume of scholia that they ‘are not meant to be exhaustive’ (2010, p. 273 n. 1); this disclaimer notwithstanding, the indexes of this volume present no glaring omissions or errors. An especially captious critic could always find examples where X. has not fully indexed their area of interest (why, for example, does the index reference πιθανῶς at 65–6 and 152–4, but not the similarly used πιθανάς at 100a?). As in every other aspect of this volume, however, X. has clearly done his due diligence to create an edition of the scholia that is approachable, rich in details and suitable for a variety of different readers. The only complaint I have is that we must continue to wait for the publication of the scholia for the final three plays of Sophocles.