ἄνδρά μοι ἔννεπε…: Are you shocked to find a misprint at the very beginning of Martin West's Teubner Odyssey?Footnote ¹ Then you've not been reading the poem in the editions of La Roche (1867–8) or Ludwich (1889–91), and you have not been reading the Iliad in West's edition (1998). You will need to consult the latter if you want to gain enlightenment on this and other orthographic niceties: the introduction to West's Odyssey is, inconveniently, not a stand-alone resource. Sampling his text alongside Allen's routinely derided OCT rarely revealed differences more substantive than, for example, ἐνὶ vs ἐπὶ in 1.211. But confidence in my collation may be undermined when I confess that I almost missed μηδὲ vs μέγα δέ in 13.158: West's decision to set aside the entire ancient textual tradition in favour of Aristophanes of Byzantium's conjecture strikes me as reckless. Strongly attested lines have no immunity to West's suspicions (e.g. 1.171–3). Suspect lines are variously queried in the apparatus, or bracketed in the text, or moved from text to apparatus. The last of these options is disruptive to the reading experience, and such a sharply polarized layout can hardly avoid being arbitrary: doubtfulness is a continuum. I, at any rate, was unable to extract a consistent set of criteria underlying West's choices among the three options. But his handling of these difficult decisions is more restrained than I had expected. The apparatus, once its conventions have become familiar, is clear and informative; an unprecedented range of papyri is cited; the testimonia, too, are given in unprecedented abundance. Allen, of course, but also von der Mühll (1946) and Thiel (1991) are put in the shade by West's final scholarly tour de force.

In one of his previous editorial engagements with epic, West produced a Loeb edition of The Battle of Frogs and Mice. Joel Christensen and Erik Robinson provide a text, translation, and first English commentary, with the needs of students primarily in mind.Footnote ² Having followed with interest the development of its digital proekdosis, I looked forward to seeing their work's fulfilment in print. I am disappointed. It is plagued by typos (e.g. ‘redunancy’, 80; ‘scholist’, 84), editing errors (‘lends some support to the omission of lines 22–3 should be omitted’, 79), and a frequent lack of clarity (e.g. ‘Lines 22–3 are omitted by some MSS…Accepting these lines as interpolations requires a thematic balancing to establish Psicharpax's status among the mice’, 77). Making sense of vaguely formulated text-critical comments in the commentary (e.g. ‘Variations include σὺν ἔντεσιν/σὺν [metrically problematic] or σὺν ἐκείνῳ…Here the feminine ἐκείναις does not have a clear antecedent’, 117) would have been easier if the text had been supplied with even a minimal critical apparatus, and if the line numbers in the commentary corresponded to those in the text – but after line 96 they don't: line 100 in the text is line 98 in the commentary, and by the end of the poem the discrepancy has grown to 13 lines. The note that I quoted just now is numbered 157 but refers to line 161 in the text. The editors declare that ‘for readers who are just beginning in Greek… we have tried to maintain correlation between the lines of the translation and the original’ (36; since their text includes Byzantine interpolations, ‘original’ is a problematic choice of word). But they should have tried harder: the line numbers in the (non-facing) translation concur with the commentary, not the text. What conclusions should we draw from this about the publisher's commitment to quality control? It does not seem commensurate with their pricing policy. And did the author of the puff quote that adorns the back cover read the book before declaring it ‘a wonderful edition…a marvelous aid to the understanding and appreciation of this too little known work of Greek poetry’?

But, to return to the Odyssey: Anthony Verity's translation is now available in Oxford World's Classics, with an introduction by William Allan.Footnote ³ Like Verity's Iliad, it keeps close to the line numbering of the Greek, does not claim to be ‘poetic’, and aims at a ‘straightforward English register’, though the ‘greater variation of voices…from the elevated to the everyday’ is reflected in shifts ‘from current to archaic idiom’ which ‘some readers…may find awkward’ (xxvi). When I reviewed Verity's Iliad (G&R 59 [2012], 247), I worried that a translation that looked like poetry and read like prose risked putting off every class of reader, but acknowledged that it was accurate, clear, and not dull. Perhaps I missed something: my forays into the Odyssey turned up instances of positive eloquence. For example:

A new translation of Aristotle's Rhetoric has appeared in the same series.Footnote ⁴ Robin Waterfield is a prolific translator, with a gift for smooth and readable prose. When working with his translations of Plato, I have often felt that the smoothness has been achieved at the cost of blurring important nuances of the original. I didn't get that feeling from his version of the Rhetoric, which is clear, precise, and, if not quite as compressed as the original, still economical, and retains something of the flavour of Aristotle's distinctive brand of pedantry. Harvey Yunis (who Waterfield suggests should share credit for the translation) contributes an introduction and notes with which Momus himself would be hard-pressed to find fault. But, since I'm here to lend a helping hand: one might object to the slide from ‘the sophists (or some of them)’ (xiii) to ‘the sophists’ (xiv): ‘some sophists…those sophists’ would be less easily assimilated to crude and polemical generalizations about ‘the’ sophists. Yunis also does less than justice to the sophists (or some of them) when he says that ‘rhetoric now includes private as well public communication’ (xxiii, my emphasis): see already Pl. Soph. 222c9–d1; Phdr. 261a7–9; Gorg. 456a7–5b; Alcidamas Soph. 9; Isocr. Antidosis 204; Rhet. ad Alex. 38, 1445b27–29. Such lapses are rare. The translation alone would merit a very strong recommendation; combined with the well-informed and efficiently informative supporting material, I put it well ahead of any of its current competitors.

Wouldn't it be liberating to live in a world in which plays that represent complex webs of human interaction were not reduced to the interplay of abstract categories? Introducing the latest in his Looking at… series – looking, in this case, at Antigone – David Stuttard writes as follows: ‘It is the story of the clash of opposites: male versus female, age versus youth, religion versus secularism, to list but a few’ (1).Footnote ⁵ I hope I don't need to point out that no character in Sophocles’ play is a secularist. More importantly, the clashes that Sophocles does portray are not generic but uniquely individual: not ‘male’ and ‘female’, but this male and that female in these particular circumstances. And those circumstances are complex. Alex Garvie and Alan Sommerstein converge on similar conclusions to the question ‘Antigone: right or wrong?’ She is certainly right to condemn Creon's edict. But suppose she had given way to Ismene in the opening scene: the play would, of course, be much duller, but Thebes would still be polluted by the exposed corpse; Teiresias would have to intervene; Creon, in this scenario not enraged by the defiance of his niece and his son, would surely have been more receptive to the seer's advice. Antigone's judgement is sound, but her actions are catastrophic. So, of course, are Creon's. But Brad Levett's focus on his character (his ‘autocratic nature’, 40: cf. Robert Garland's ‘Creon is the kind of person…’, 128) is inadequate: an appreciation of the circumstances in which he acts is also necessary. Creon has just moved to fill a dangerous power vacuum in a faction-ridden city, at a moment of crisis, with limited information at his disposal, and with no reason to be complacent about the stability of his position; in such a situation he had good reason to believe that signs of irresolution would be objectively risky. But Helen Foley, who does show awareness of Creon's situational problems (146), misstates his error of judgement: what is ‘disruptive’ is not ‘inflicting punishment on the dead traitor’, but the particular punishment inflicted. Other ways of disposing of a corpse without honour were available. Hanna Roisman provides an acute analysis of Antigone's interaction with Ismene, highlighting her opportunistic speech (‘reacting to what she hears rather than acting on considered principles’, 69). Ruth Scodel applies attribution theory to Antigone's change of heart. Rush Rehm, on Antigone and the rights of the earth, is thoughtful, but in need of sharper conceptual articulation (if a victim is denied something that is his by law or established custom, in what way does our term ‘right’ fail to capture what the victim is deprived of?). Other papers discuss incest, divinity, religion, Euripides’ reception of Sophocles’ play, and modern receptions. My disagreements should be taken as an index of the stimulus provided by this volume – one of the strongest in a series of uneven quality. And though at first reading I found Stuttard's translation flat, and the layout of the choral sections in a thin dribble off-putting, it grew on me each time I returned to it.

Since the wholly irrational notion that a play that begins with a plague was probably composed during or just after an actual plague has always annoyed me, I got some personal satisfaction from the evisceration of this theory in the introduction to Patrick Finglass’ edition of Oedipus the King.Footnote ⁶ But no one who has used his editions of Electra (G&R 56 [2009], 102) and Ajax (G&R 59 [2012], 249–50) will suppose that this is the only, or indeed the most important, cause for rejoicing which the volume affords. The introduction covers (in addition to the date of first performance: 430s ‘if forced to name a specific date…but a date in the 440s or 420s would not surprise’, 3) production and staging; myth and originality (bringing out the significance of Sophocles’ innovations); what kind of a play it is (an acute analysis of the complex of motifs on which it draws); transmission (‘focusing on the first performance to the exclusion of any other is probably contrary to the playwright's own intentions’, xii); and text (‘after more than two thousand years of scholarship the study of Sophocles’ text is still in its infancy’, 94). The text and apparatus is followed by 455 pages of commentary, with a complete translation embedded in the lemmas. The bibliography runs to 57 pages. In the preface Finglass lists a selection of passages where his text differs substantively from Lloyd-Jones and Wilson's OCT, of which ‘many…have major implications for sense and interpretation’ (ix n. 2). The list provides a salutary antidote to complacency about the state of the text of Sophocles. Working through this list would be an excellent tutorial in textual criticism.

Anna Lamari offers ‘a fresh look on ancient reperformances of tragedy, placing them in the fifth- and fourth-century contexts of cultural travelling’ (1).Footnote ⁷ The introduction begins with a helpful reminder of existing scholarship on this topic, and of the Athenocentric, single-performance model that it is superseding. The four main chapters (on travelling poets, political contexts, travelling actors, and vase-painting) are then summarized at excessive length. Lamari's work is complementary to Edmund Stewart's Greek Tragedy on the Move (G&R 65.1 [2018], 104–5), but more diffuse, less tightly argued, and – crucially – less disciplined in its use of primary evidence. For example, the Aristophanic Dionysus’ claim ‘that truly talented poets are dead, while those who are alive are bad’ is, according to Lamari, ‘also maintained by Aristotle’ (3). She cites Poet. 1450a25, where Aristotle says that tragedies by most modern poets lack a specific feature. It was a feature which, he also says, was missing from Zeuxis’ paintings (1450a26–9): was he thereby condemning Zeuxis as a ‘bad’ painter? Elsewhere Aristotle refers to deficiencies in Euripides’ oikonomia (1429b29): did he think that Euripides was a ‘bad’ poet? Or was he, perhaps, clever enough to recognize a large middle ground between optimal and bad? (The question is rhetorical but, if you can't work out the answer, have a look at, for example, Poet. 1453a7–9.) If ‘Aeschylus travelled to Sicily at the beginning of his career in order to direct his Aetnaeae’ (8), received chronologies of the poet's career need a radical overhaul. The hypothesis that Frogs 1029 reflects a version of Persians revised for performance in Sicily is, in Lamari's view, ‘a plausible scenario: Aeschylus organized a reperformance of the Persians in Sicily, using a version changed to be more appropriate for the place and the audience. Aristophanes must have been aware of this version, and this is the one he cites’ (33). But why would Aristophanes cite a version optimised for performance in Sicily in a play to be performed in Athens? This version, Lamari suggests, ‘could have’ been performed in Athens shortly before Frogs, and Aristophanes ‘could have’ attended it (34). So the confident ‘must have’ needs a pair of ad hoc ‘could haves’ to eliminate its prima facie implausibility. As for the treatment of primary evidence, on successive pages Lamari misreports Laches’ observation of what does happen (Pl. Laches 183a–b) as a prescription (‘instructs…maintains should be’, 102), and the Athenian Stranger's proposed legislation for Magnesia (Leg. 817c–d) as a description of what actually happens in Athens (103).

I had not fully appreciated how entertaining Euripides’ Cyclops is until I read Carl Shaw's contribution to Bloomsbury's Companions to Greek and Roman Tragedy.Footnote ⁸ Chapter 1 introduces satyr drama in general, and Cyclops in particular. Chapter 2 skilfully combines analysis of the plot and its performance, giving a strong sense of the play's stage presence. Chapter 3, ‘Themes, Issues, and Functions’, inevitably gives more scope for disagreement. Shaw is, I think, too hasty in making a philosopher out of Polyphemus (80–1): violent thugs and antinomian philosophers may have some opinions in common, but the former are less likely to be dialectically sophisticated, and the latter are less likely to knock out your brains and eat you. If, as Shaw suggests, Euripides composed Cyclops with the Sicilian disaster in mind (84), his audience might have found more satisfaction in Odysseus’ stabbing of the Sicilian monster than Shaw, who judges it ‘somewhat barbaric’ and ‘unnecessary’ (85). Since he enjoys the luxury of not having a massive reception history to deal with, Shaw sets the play in its literary context in Chapter 4 by engaging at length with connections to earlier literature. Some of what is said here could usefully have been mentioned earlier in the book. Momus has asked me to point out that the exceptionally potent wine described in Od. 9.209 is not Cyclopean (133 n. 42), but imported by Odysseus from Ismarus.

And, finally, Duane W. Roller's Historical and Topographical Guide to the Geography of Strabo.Footnote ⁹ A non-Classicist friend who noticed it on my dining-room table commented on its imposing bulk, and surreptitiously googled in order to find out where Strabo – an evidently important ancient city of which she'd never heard – was located. Few readers of Greece & Rome will fall into that error; those who have confident mastery of all the material that Roller covers will also be few. Indeed, not even Roller manages that: he thinks that the phrase ‘character, emotion, and actions’ (Str. 1.2.3) is ‘a direct quotation from the opening of Aristotle's Poetics’ (16). On the historical and topographical matters to which the book is primarily devoted, however, his relentlessly detailed commentary commands greater confidence. Katherine Clarke, reviewing Roller's English translation of the Geography (CPh 111 [2016], 185–90), observed that

I have doubts about ‘relax and enjoy’: but the support provided by Roller's commentary will certainly make reading Strabo easier and more informative. There is also an accompanying online map, which is well worth a visit.Footnote ¹⁰