Belatedness is past its use-by date. As Susan Stephens observes at the beginning of The Poets of Alexandria, ‘all literature has some predecessor’ (1).Footnote ¹ Therefore coming after fails to define a difference. The difference on which Stephens focuses instead is the city of Alexandria: ‘the unique social and political demands of this new place’, and the creation of a literary culture that responded to those demands. This, then, is explicitly not a book about Hellenistic poetry (though the wider horizon is not ignored), but about four Alexandrian poets whose work is sufficiently non-fragmentary to be treated ‘with aesthetic coherence’ (18): Posidippus, Theocritus, Callimachus, and Apollonius. There is also an excellent and informative chapter on reception. Given these poets' diverse origins it is surprising how strong a sense of the poetry's rootedness in a specific time and place Stephens is able to give. Commendably, she approaches ‘areas of overlap’, not as ‘aesthetic differences, even literary quarrels’, but as ‘the by-product of an environment of intense experiment as these poets attempt to integrate a novel kingship into the experiences and value systems that they individually and as part of an immigrant collective strove to articulate’ (22). I'm on record as not being a great admirer of Apollonius as a narrator (though I concede that he is a very fine verbal craftsman). My lack of enthusiasm was reinforced (I assume contrary to her intention) by Stephens' discussion of the Argonautica. Consider, for example, this perfectly accurate statement: ‘Pindar's poem [Py. 4] stacks successive time-frames. Apollonius unfolds these layers so that events now occur chronologically’ (123). When the Odyssey is repackaged for children, the structure is usually unfolded so that events occur chronologically: that is not an aesthetic improvement. Stephens says that Longinus ‘grudgingly concedes the technical perfection of the Alexandrians’ (144); ‘condescendingly’ would be a better word, since Longinus ranks perfection as a second-rate excellence. More importantly, Longinian sublimity does not depend on ‘natural grandeur’, but on the greatness of an author's nature. Sublimity can be found in breathtakingly brilliant insights into a lover's experiences (Subl. 10.2–3), or in a figure (16.1–4), or in a subtle rhythmical effect (39.4): a pedestrian description of natural grandeur will not do the job. When I reviewed Stephens' edition of Callimachus' Hymns (G&R 63 [2016], 119), I expressed myself with unaccustomed enthusiasm. Her new book, written in concise but lucid prose, is a worthy successor.

Callimachus, the best of Stephens' poetic quartet, also has an entry-level book of his own.Footnote ² Richard Rawles is able to give the poet about three and a half times more space than was available to Stephens – though she writes more concisely, is a more engaging expositor, and has the opportunity to provide the larger context. On the other hand, Rawles has enough space to give newcomers a more detailed introduction to Callimachus' poetry, and to the processes of its reconstruction. His translations, however, are prosaic and uninspiring. There are chapters on philology and poetics; the diversity of Callimachus' voices; religion and the gods; and people and places. One welcome convergence with Stephens is Rawles's insistence that ‘we should not read Callimachus…in a way that emphasizes his “lateness” in relation to more canonical Greek poetry of the archaic and classical periods’ (124). That comes in the final chapter, which is not (as I initially feared) a routine survey of receptions: Rawles's examination of the encounter between Callimachus and Rome illustrates both Callimachus' influence on Roman poetry, and the ways in which our own perceptions of the poet have been influenced by his Roman reception.

What progress has there been in the meanwhile along ‘the well-trodden wagon-road of Homer’ (to quote Rawles's translation of Pindar)? The Basler Homer-Kommentar was launched in 2000 with the publication of the Prolegomena volume; the series has now generated commentaries on thirteen books. The Basel Homer Commentary, the English translation of the series, was launched in 2015; the Prolegomena and eight books of commentary have appeared so far. Marina Coray's commentary on Book 18, published in German in 2016 (confusingly, as volume XI.2), became available in the English series in 2018.Footnote ³ Meanwhile, Richard Rutherford had been working on his Green and Yellow Cambridge commentary on the same book, published at the beginning of 2019.Footnote ⁴ Coray's ‘excellent volume’ became available to him when he had almost completed his first draft, and he admits to having ‘learned much’ from it (x). Rutherford's tribute is well deserved, in the sense that Coray's commentary is full of valuable material. Yet in my sampling I often felt that the material had been accumulated, but not illuminatingly exploited. An extreme example is Coray's claim that the character pairs Polydamas–Hector and Patroclus–Achilles ‘appear analogous’ (ad 251–2). That is true only in the narrowest and least important respect: in any narratively significant sense, Hector's threat of lethal violence against Polydamas (12.248–50) is a disanalogy of overwhelming weight. There are also inconveniences that arise from the design of the Basel series (for which, of course, Coray is not to blame). In particular, the commentary volumes are not self-sufficient: they require frequent cross-reference to the Prolegomena volume (the cross-references dependent in turn on cryptic abbreviations). Exploitation of the wealth of Coray's excellent, if sometimes frustrating, scholarship will, I fear, be inhibited by this inconvenient arrangement, as well as by the eye-watering cost of the Basel series. By contrast, Rutherford's self-contained commentary, as well as being far more affordable, is far more user-friendly and far more informative. Admittedly, informativeness is a variable, contingent on the kind of information that the reader is looking for. But, for the most part, Rutherford's information had a stronger grip on my attention; I was spared the annoyance of having to decipher abbreviations such as ‘VB formula’; and the note on ὀρθοκραιράων (18.3) was where I would have wanted to find it, and not in a separate commentary on Book 19.

The first instalment of Matthew Wright's Lost Plays of Greek Tragedy covered the ‘neglected authors' (G&R 64 [2017], 184–5). The lost plays of the big three are tackled in the promised second volume, which aims to show that ‘even these familiar authors are much less well known than we might like to think’ (1).Footnote ⁵ Wright has ‘steered clear of any attempt to “reconstruct” these plays…what we call “reconstruction” is essentially imaginative fiction’ (4); he leaves that exercise to the reader. He does not disassociate himself entirely from the reconstructive project: ‘by showing as clearly as possible what is actually known about these plays and what remains unknown, I hope to have made the task of “reconstruction” easier’. But that is not the primary focus of his interest:

The only word in that quotation that surprises me is ‘surprising’. Wright warns against using ‘labels such as “alternative” or “unorthodox” when talking about lost plays', since that accords privileged status to the few surviving plays and implies that ‘those versions were already normative in the fifth century’ (212); ‘it seems better to avoid thinking in terms of “authoritative” versus “alternative” versions and instead to view Greek tragedy as a genre characterized by variety and plurality’ (213). Here, too, only one thing surprises me: the unnecessarily tentative ‘seems’. While it is true to say that ‘Antigone was not Sophocles’ own creation’, and that she ‘almost certainly appeared in the Epic Cycle and elsewhere in early Greek poetry’ (222), that means very little. Antigone, to be sure, was not Sophocles' creation: but his Antigone was. His Haemon was not the victim of the Sphinx that terrorized Thebes before Oedipus became king (Oedipodea F3 West); his Ismene was not killed by Tydeus before the defeat of the Seven (Mimnermus F21 West); his Antigone and Ismene were not burned to death in the temple of Hera by the son of Eteocles (Ion of Chios F1 Page); and there is no reason to suppose that he gave his Antigone a role replicated from any pre-existing source. Paradoxically, the one thing that puzzled me most in this thought-provoking volume was Wright's reading of an extant tragedy: ‘it would be harder to place the heroine of the extant Medea in the “Bad Woman” type’ (232). The Medea of the extant play is responsible for the deaths of her brother, Creon, Creon's daughter, and her own two sons. What, I wonder, does a woman have to do to provoke Wright to moral outrage?

In a sense, Isabelle Torrance's Euripides is also about fragmentary tragedies.Footnote ⁶ The book is structured round four themes (spectacular theatre; religion and philosophy; rhetoric and relevance; literary sophistication), with the result that the surviving, more or less complete plays are dismembered into a series of thematic patchworks. Thus Euripides, who is famed for making plays, becomes an author of fragments. That is not an approach that I warm to – except in the final chapter on reception, which comes to life by being structured round three conflicts (the battles of the sexes, the confrontation between god and man [sic], and warfare) and traces ‘the shifting cultural and diachronic responses to the original conflicts as they were presented by Euripides’ (117). Elsewhere, though, it seemed to me that Torrance should have reflected on and generalized her own observation that ‘removing a philosophical or theological hypothesis from its dramatic context does nothing to help interpret its meaning within the play’ (68). Before we reach the thematic fragments, however, we pass through a litter of biographical and quasi-biographical information and misinformation about Euripides (‘Life and Works’). Here we learn, for example, that ‘it is reasonable to suppose that he did not have a military career, unlike Aeschylus and Sophocles’ (2). Certainly, Euripides was not a military specialist like (for example) Lamachus: but nor were Aeschylus or Sophocles (the latter served as stratēgos, but that was not a specifically military appointment, and Pericles did not rate his grasp of military matters highly, if Ion of Chios is to be trusted). Aeschylus and Sophocles both saw military action: if Euripides didn't, how did he avoid it? And why don't we have any jokes about his evasion of duty?

To be fair, introductory books are very difficult to write. Ian Storey has published a deservedly well-received Bloomsbury Companion to Euripides’ Suppliant Women, and is undoubtedly one of our foremost experts on Aristophanes. But his Companion to Peace seemed to me misjudged.Footnote ⁷ Here, too, the play is presented in fragments, not as a structured whole: the nearest we come to that is a synopsis in fifty-two lines of un-cramped text (19–20). Compare that with the forty-two lines of text devoted to a discussion of pax in Augustan Rome (77–8), and the skewing of relative priorities becomes vividly apparent. Indeed, I could not see why Augustan pax earned any place at all in a book about a Greek comedy on the modest scale of a Bloomsbury Companion. But its inclusion is symptomatic of a more general failure of selectivity: this book is stuffed full of information that, though genuinely interesting, is likely to overwhelm and confuse the target audience. Even I sometimes found the volume's density and lack of focus difficult to follow. Storey's discussion of the number of doors, for example, could have been clearer. He cautiously concludes that ‘more than one door…seems to be expected in Peace’ (105, my emphasis), but also states confidently that ‘this is not required anywhere else in extant fifth-century drama’. I find that hard to reconcile with the conclusions he had previously drawn from Eupolis F48 and Clouds (103). Did he mean ‘extant fifth-century tragedy’? Even if that is what he meant, the extant plays are a very small subset of fifth-century tragedy: given the number of tragedies lost, how sure can we be that none of them used more than one door? As Matthew Wright observes, ‘we are working in a realm of radical uncertainty’ (Wright, Lost Plays of Greek Tragedy, 239).

By contrast, and returning to Isabelle Torrance, her Bloomsbury Companion to Iphigeneia Among the Taurians is a model of the genre.Footnote ⁸ It covers setting, action, and plot; characters and chorus; ethnicity and gender; ritual and the gods; and reception (this last chapter is organized thematically: ethnicity, gender, and religion). The exposition is consistently clear and concise. My only complaint is an instance of the mangling of Aristotle that is endemic in scholarship on tragedy. Torrance identifies metabolē as ‘the term used by Aristotle to capture the concept of a reversal dependent on peripeteia and anagnōrisis’ (26). That implies that there is no metabolē in a simple plot (i.e. one that does not have a peripeteia or anagnōrisis), which is false. And, since she glosses peripeteia (inaccurately) as ‘a powerful reversal of fortune’, metabolē becomes a reversal dependent on a powerful reversal, which verges on tautology.

Gunther Martin begins the preface to his commentary on Euripides' Ion with the statement: ‘At outset, the task seemed straightforward: to answer every question that might be asked. It soon turned out to be unfeasible, and even presumptuous' (v).Footnote ⁹ I cannot believe that he was ever so delusional, and interpret the statement as a rhetorical pose. But the more realistic goal he sets himself in the next paragraph is still exceptionally challenging:

Martin effects his programme with remarkable success, both in the 42-page introduction (covering structure, problems of interpretation, Euripides' mythological innovations and their ideological implications, date, staging, and the text) and in the 329-page commentary. The text is newly constituted, differing from Diggle in 170 places (detailed on 113–16), including the diagnosis of twenty-four interpolations, amounting to ninety-eight lines. There are, inevitably, things that I would question: given limited space, I restrict myself to two random examples. In the section on the date of first performance, Martin writes:

That carries no weight as a dating criterion, since the initial assumption that the Athens of the remote past portrayed in the play must have conformed to whatever laws were in force at the time of the play's performance is groundless. In his commentary on lines 1569–94, Martin gives a convincing interpretation of Euripides’ mythological innovations. But the claim that ‘Euripides’ genealogy does not only affirm but also undercuts Athens' distinctiveness' (535) is an overstatement. Since there is nothing in Martin's analysis that denies Athenian primacy, Athenian distinctiveness is not ‘undercut’, though it is reframed and perhaps qualified. But these are details: they do not undercut, and at most only marginally qualify, Martin's achievement in this outstanding commentary.

David Kovacs, too, prefaces his commentary on Troades with a commentarial manifesto: ‘It is the purpose of a commentary on a Greek tragedy to encourage its readers to listen closely to what the characters are saying’ (v).Footnote ¹⁰ He then unpacks the multiple layers of that task, from the grammatical explanation of individual lines or sentences up to ‘what sort of place the world of the play is…and wherein lies whatever unity the work possesses’. At that top level, ‘the interpretation of the whole play’, Kovacs warns his readers that ‘the present volume argues that certain views about Euripides that have dominated scholarship from the early nineteenth century until recently and continue to have advocates have made it difficult to take in its characters’ words and what they might imply’ (v). And at ‘the other end of the scale from the interpretation of the whole are the many points of detail where the text must be either explained or emended or corruptions cordoned off by means obeli’ (vi). Those who have followed Kovacs' textual work will not be surprised to learn that his text differs from Diggle ‘in some hundred places’ (vi): a list of the ‘most important interventions, both sceptical and conservative’ is provided in a footnote. As for the positions that he rejects at the global level, these are (of course) the view ‘that the play is Euripides’ response to the Athenian destruction of Melos', and the view ‘that Euripides was a disbeliever in the gods and that therefore (a big “therefore” this) he cannot be inviting his audience to enter into the spirit of tragic drama as practised by his predecessors and contemporaries' (v–vi). His opposition to these positions is trenchantly restated in the introduction, with support in the commentary and an appendix. Since I have held substantially the same opinion for almost four decades, I am not inclined to raise an objection. On the connections between the three tragedies in the production of which Troades was a part, I have for a long time wavered between scepticism and agnosticism: Kovacs has overcome my doubts.