I begin with a warm welcome for Evangelos Alexiou's Greek Rhetoric of the 4th Century bc,Footnote ¹ a ‘revised and slightly abbreviated’ version of the modern Greek edition published in 2016 (ix). Though the volume's title points to a primary focus on the fourth century, sufficient attention is given to the late fifth and early third centuries to provide context. As ‘rhetoric’ in the title indicates, the book's scope is not limited to oratory: Chapter 1 outlines the development of a rhetorical culture; Chapter 2 introduces theoretical debates about rhetoric (Plato, Isocrates, Alcidamas); and Chapter 3 deals with rhetorical handbooks (Anaximenes, Aristotle, and the theoretical precepts embedded in Isocrates). Oratory comes to the fore in Chapter 4, which introduces the ‘canon’ of ten Attic orators: in keeping with the fourth-century focus, Antiphon, Andocides, and Lysias receive no more than sporadic attention; conversely, extra-canonical fourth-century orators (Apollodorus, the author of Against Neaera, Hegesippus, and Demades) receive limited coverage. The remaining chapters deal with the seven major canonical orators: Isocrates, Demosthenes, Aeschines, Isaeus, Lycurgus, Hyperides, and Dinarchus. Each chapter follows the same basic pattern: life, work, speeches, style, transmission of text and reception. Isocrates and Demosthenes have additional sections on research trends and on, respectively, Isocratean ideology and issues of authenticity in the Demosthenic corpus. In the case of Isaeus, there is a brief discussion of contract oratory; Lycurgus is introduced as ‘the relentless prosecutor’. Generous extracts from primary sources are provided, in Greek and in English translation; small-type sections signal a level of detail that some readers may wish to pass over. The footnotes provide extensive references to older as well as more recent scholarship. The thirty-page bibliography is organized by chapter (a helpful arrangement in a book of this kind, despite the resulting repetition); the footnotes supply some additional references. Bibliographical supplements to the original edition have been supplied ‘only in isolated cases’ (ix). In short, this volume is a thorough, well-conceived, and organized synthesis that will be recognized, without doubt, as a landmark contribution. There are, inevitably, potential points of contention. The volume's subtitle, ‘the elixir of democracy and individuality’, ties rhetoric more closely to democracy and to Athens than is warranted: the precarious balancing act which acknowledges that rhetoric ‘has never been divorced from human activity’ while insisting that ‘its vital political space was the democracy of city-states’ (ix–x) seems to me untenable. Alexiou acknowledges that ‘the gift of speaking well, natural eloquence, was considered a virtue already by Homer's era’ (ix), and that ‘the natural gift of speaking well was considered a virtue’ (1). But the repeated insistence on natural eloquence is perplexing. Phoenix, in the embassy scene in Iliad 9, makes it clear that his remit included the teaching of eloquence (Il. 9.442, διδασκέμεναι): Alexiou only quotes the following line, which he mistakenly assigns to Book 10. (The only other typo that I noticed was ‘Aritsotle’ [97]. I, too, have a tendency to mistype the Stagirite's name, though my own automatic transposition is, alas, embarrassingly scatological.) Alexiou provides examples of later Greek assessments of fourth-century orators, including (for example) Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Hermogenes, and the author of On Sublimity (the reluctance to commit to the ‘pseudo’ prefix is my, not Alexiou's, reservation). He observes cryptically that ‘we are aware of Didymus’ commentary’ (245); but the extensive late ancient scholia, which contain material from Menander's Demosthenic commentaries, disappointingly evoke no sign of awareness.

The two Marshalls (Haillie and C. W.) have done a fine job in their role as editors of the fifth volume of the Greek Drama series.Footnote ² Eric Csapo and Peter Wilson open with an investigation of ‘the politics of Greece's theatrical revolution’ in (roughly) the fifth and fourth centuries, approached ‘from the perspective of ancient reception’ (1). They ground their argument on a survey of all forms of evidence for theatre outside Athens: for each city a date range is provided for the reception of theatrical culture, together with the city's political orientation at the time of reception. These data make it possible to track correlations between constitutional change and the adoption of theatre culture. The conclusion reached is that theatre culture was pervasive in democracies, but that autocratic regimes also embraced it, while oligarchies abstained. This nuanced, data-led study shows convincingly that ‘it would be a serious mistake to fall back on the assumption that…the only contexts that really matter for interpreting drama or any other form of theatre culture in this period are democracy and Athens’ (17). It is unfortunate, therefore, that Emily Mattison begins her contribution to the volume by stating that ‘tragedy is the quintessential Athenian genre’ (37): that claim has no discernible relevance to her aim ‘to encourage the consideration of tragedy developing as part of a poetic tradition that includes elegy’ (37). Though Mattison's proposal is not startlingly original, she draws skilfully on Archilochus, Tyrtaeus, and Solon to illustrate her thesis in the case of Philoctetes. Sheila Murnaghan on ‘selective memory and epic reminiscence’ in Ajax shows in a very satisfying way how Athene's ‘highly selective snapshot’ is set against ‘a multifaceted portrait’ that ‘does justice to the ups and downs of his changing fortunes and to the intrinsic doubleness of heroic figures…as both protectors of their community and as embodiments of single-minded, destructive anger’ (35). Francis Dunn uses Euripides’ Electra to illustrate ‘affective suspense’: not suspense about events, but ‘suspense about the characters involved, and uncertainty concerning their affective bond’ (73). How and when will Electra form an affective bond with her long-lost brother? How and when will the hostile feelings impelling revenge reach an emotionally suitable outcome (84–5)? Wilfred Major's census of soldiers in New Comedy reveals a lack of braggarts, which suggests that the stereotype is a misleading back-projection from Roman Comedy.

Euripides’ Children of Heracles Footnote ³ has received relatively little appreciative attention: Florence Yoon's contribution to the Bloomsbury Companions to Greek and Roman Tragedy has convinced me that the play's neglect is undeserved. Yoon opens up this play's neglected riches in crisp, lucid, and precise prose. The first chapter (‘Action and Expectation’) outlines the anticipations that the audience may have had at the outset. She then guides us through the action, helpfully summarizing the ‘probable expectations established’ at each point in the play's structure. She explains clearly why a ‘missing scene’ has been suspected, and why that suspicion is unfounded. The second chapter (‘Summing the Parts’) illustrates three ways of framing the play's action: the Heraclids themselves; their relationship with Athens; and the variety of plot-patterns accessible to an experienced audience-member – in this case, supplication, sacrifice, battle, and revenge. Yoon draws attention to ‘the immense scope and compression of the play’ and its ‘quick succession of distinct but unresolved patterns’, which yield ‘a wonderfully complex and wide-ranging play that accommodates a variety of focus points’ (41). Chapter 3 notes the absence of major figures (Heracles, Theseus, Hyllus) from the stage, and the ways in which these absent characters are used to ‘generate meaning’ (45). In the case of Eurystheus, the ‘odious image’ of the offstage character is dispelled when the actual character comes on stage, ‘enabling the extraordinary reversals of the final scene’ (59). Chapter 4 focuses on a ‘cast of characters…striking in both its collective social vulnerability and its dramatic vulnerability’ (61), and concludes that the play ‘gives not only voice but power to the conventionally powerless’ (85). The final chapter (‘Then and Now’) thwarts the popular scholarly sport of date-guessing by showing how many different conjectural fits can be postulated between play and contemporary events within the broad limits from 445 to 426 bce (87–96). Yoon has produced an excellent and illuminating treatment of what turns out to be an excellent play.

For a broader perspective on tragedy's children, I turned next to Emma Griffith's Children in Greek Tragedy.Footnote ⁴ Regrettably, it left me disappointed. Chapter 2, the longest in the book, addresses staging issues and the management of child actors. It does provide many acute practical observations and convincing inferences from the scripts. But these are too often occluded by over-cautious hesitations and a convoluted style of writing: effective communication is impeded by an excess of modal verbs and self-qualifications. The introductory chapter (‘Contexts’) holds us in suspense for twenty-five pages before we are furnished with a very brief outline of what is to follow. In the interim, we have made our acquaintance with Griffith's recurrent but (in my view) pointless preoccupation with quantum physics. (I note in passing that Sokal was not disseminating ‘deliberate misinformation’ [6 n. 29]: misinformation aims to conceal, Sokal aimed to expose.) Chapter 3 has good things to say on children as potential adults (‘The child is not killed as a child but as a potential adult’, 145, emphasis in original); Chapter 4, on pathos, likewise provides an important reminder that ‘pathos is only one part of the overall pattern’ (237). Chapter 5 gives a very brief overview of the plays and playwrights which the book has covered; Chapter 6 gives an even briefer set of conclusions and future directions. There are fifty-four pages of bibliography: the overload may have been a contributory factor to the volume's deficiencies in clarity, directness, and focused relevance. The bibliography is, even so, incomplete as it stands: at least five cited items are missing. In addition, at least ten index entries are out of alphabetical order; Polymestor becomes ‘Polymester’ on at least five occasions; Oidipous becomes ‘Oidipus’ on at least two occasions; cross-referencing is not always helpful (e.g. 51 n. 40: ‘see text and comment in Chapter 1’); and two items of bibliography are attributed to the wrong Heath.

I cannot help warming to an author who begins with a two-page chapter entitled ‘General Conclusions, or How to Read This Book’.Footnote ⁵ The author is Nikos Manousakis, who applies state-of-the-art statistical techniques to determining the attribution of Prometheus Bound. The quantitative evidence comprises two kinds of textual feature: style, which is under the author's conscious control, and trace, which is not. These two categories of evidence converge on the conclusion that the author cannot be Aeschylus; that it is ‘not impossible’ that the author was close to Sophocles or his work; and that it was ‘possibly’ composed between 440 and 430 bce (1). That date range is encouragingly consistent with Martin West's observation that a Prometheus trilogy would fit well with the dedication of the new temple of Hephaestus.Footnote ⁶ Chapter 2 (‘Introduction’) enlarges on the admirably precise and focused initial summary. Chapter 3 surveys the prior history of scholarship on the play's attribution. The core of the argument is then presented in two long chapters. Chapter 4 covers quantitative style in ninety-seven pages; Chapter 5 attends to the application of automated authorship attribution in seventy-nine pages. At this point the terminology becomes bewilderingly dense (e.g. ‘hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis’, 187), and Manousakis’ explanations of the multiple methodologies that he applies are likely to pose an insuperable challenge to most Classicists. (I'm confidently assuming that it's not just me.) But perseverance will lead, if not to complete comprehension, at least to a measure of enlightenment, and in certain cases visual plots of the data provide an aid to intelligibility. The results consistently point to an author who is closely engaged with Sophocles. In a brief final chapter, Manousakis proposes Sophocles’ son Euaeon as an alternative to Euphorion, his more frequently touted brother; but Manousakis concedes that ‘in all likelihood we will never know who its actual author was’ (225). Speculation about the actual author is, in any case, beside the point. What is clear from the cumulative force of Manousakis’ multiple and convergent analyses is that Aeschylus can no longer be regarded as a credible contender for the authorship of this play.

Terminological opacity is perhaps the only thing that statistical authorship attribution methodologies have in common with narratology. In the case of automated authorship attribution, the obstacle to comprehension is a terminology that is well defined but impenetrable for a lay readership. In the case of narratology, the obstacle to comprehension is a terminology that lacks stable, consistent and precise definitions. To quote Tobias Myers:Footnote ⁷ ‘Focalization, to offer a gross oversimplification sufficient for present purposes, is the technique by which a narrator narrates from a particular character's perspective. In fact, narratologists do not agree on what constitutes focalization’ (61 n. 96). A term that has been oversimplified and that lacks an agreed meaning does not seem very useful: there is a manifest deficit in meaningful content. Myers’ prose is dense, and pervasively elusive. To take a random example: ‘Of course, for the audience Priam and his children are in some sense story-characters, or individuals long dead…But it is precisely this distinction between story-characters and living human beings that the poet aims to blur by staging his listeners as viewers’ (97, my emphases). But why is that ‘of course’? In what sense are Priam and his children not story-characters? What difference does the ‘or’ express between story-characters and long-dead individuals? How, ‘precisely’, does staging listeners as viewers achieve the blurring between dead story-characters and living human beings? Or, to take another example: ‘the poem becomes metapoetic – or the performance becomes metaperformative – when what is transpiring at Troy and on Olympus appears to comment on, or somehow relate directly to, what they themselves are doing by participating in this performance of the Iliad’ (55, my emphases once more). Here, the criteria for metaperformativity, one of Myer's key concepts, are so under-specified that elusiveness may somehow appear to shade into evasiveness. These are not isolated examples. I confess, then, that I failed to find a convincingly robust interpretation of Myers’ argument. And yet this book contains abundant evidence of a formidably intelligent reader. So I will not rule out the possibility that the failure of comprehension might in some sense be mine.

The lack of a stable, consistent, and well-defined terminology would be a serious defect in a system of narratology. But in Genevieve Lively's reception history of narrative poeticsFootnote ⁸ such systemic defects become part of the raw material of narratology's history – or, perhaps, of the history of narratologies. After a ten-page introduction, Lively's narrative covers antiquity in four chapters (roughly speaking: Plato, Aristotle, Horace, and ancient commentaries) and more recent developments in six (Russian Formalism, Neo-Aristotelianism, Prestructuralism, Structuralism, Poststructuralism, and Postclassicism). The yawning gulf between Servius and Tomashevsky is left unfilled. There is a four-page glossary: many of the entries would have benefited from more informative glossing. Lively observes that Aristotle's Poetics ‘profoundly influenced the shape of modern narratology’ (54): the implied relationship between ancient and modern narratology requires interrogation. When ancient narratology goes on to become ‘proto-narratology’ (163), one might wonder what teleological implications are conveyed by that formula: is ancient engagement with narrative an embryonic, and therefore relatively underdeveloped, antecedent of the narratologies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? Consider, for example: ‘It is in this regard, above all, that the scholia reveal their most “modern” narratological intuitions. For, in focusing upon the impact and affectivity of ancient narrative…they nicely anticipate the rhetorical poetics and priorities of modern narratology’ (89). But in what sense are these self-evidently ancient intuitions ‘modern’? The scare quotes are, as always, obfuscatory. Compare this peculiar subtitle: ‘Modern narratological terms and concepts in the Servius commentaries’ (96). Terms and concepts in Servius cannot fail to be ancient terms and concepts: modern ones were simply unavailable to Servius. Were the ancient and modern terms and concepts therefore the same? Though ancients and moderns have both had a critical interest in narrative, it does not follow that they have had the same interest – that is, that their interests are part of the same dialogue. After all, Plato in the Republic and Aristotle in the Poetics were engaging with narrative in very different ways and for very different purposes. The profound differences between those two representatives of antiquity makes it wholly implausible to conceive of ancient and modern engagements with narrative as, at base, contributions to one and the same enterprise. Conversely, Lively suggests that ‘in their editing and athetizing of ancient narratives such as Homer's Iliad, marking up lines in the text which are “not to be read”, the scholia critics paradoxically draw their reader's attention to the potential existence of multiple alternatives to the critically sanctioned storyline’ (76). I cannot see a paradox there, any more than I find it paradoxical when modern editors place brackets around lines which they diagnose as interpolated. I did, however, learn things I did not know about Servius, and appreciated the comments on the consequences of imposing modern conventions of punctuation on an ancient text (97–9). Lively is rightly sceptical about the influence of Aristotle's Poetics on Horace (77–9); she should, however, be more sceptical than she is of Janko's reconstruction of On Poets (56 and n. 2), for reasons I have set out in Studia Humaniora Tartuensia 14.A.1 (2013), 1–27. The treatment of Hermagoras of Temnos is compromised by Lively's narratological preoccupation with ‘a pre-existing common reserve of narrative stuff, or “myth kitty”’, ‘pre-existing story stuff’, ‘raw story stuff…always partially pre-formed and prepared, pre-existing as part of a traditional meta-fabula, the multi-faceted universe of ancient Greek myth’ (84). Hermagorean rhetoric, which was primarily concerned with finding effective arguments to deploy in forensic and deliberative debate, had little or nothing to do with pre-existing, traditional myth. Where does that leave us? Lively provides us with (metaphorically) a map of some dense narratological terrain(s) and (literally) a useful bibliography. The map is overloaded and lacks precision in detail; and sometimes, as in the misconception of rhetoric, it is likely to lead us astray. Yet this is, without doubt, a book worth reading. I am sure that I will return to it repeatedly as an aid to thinking about the issues it raises.