J. Bennett's Vibrant Matter: a Political Ecology of Things (2010) made a huge impact as part of the posthumanist movement in social philosophy urging a recognition of the dynamic relationships among all material things, including, but not privileging, humans. The emphasis placed on the material world, in all its variety, as a force that shapes us as much as it is shaped by us entails a de-centring of the subject–object dichotomy that relies on cognition as a condition of subjectivity. This move away from an anthropocentric model of agency argues for the ‘vibrancy’ and even agency of the material environment. One of several critical extensions of this movement is the emergence of the more extreme theory of Object Oriented Ontology (OOO), which asserts, against Kantian anthropocentric metaphysics, that objects exist in relation to one another independently of, and in ways that are entirely inaccessible to, human perception and cognition. Another important theoretical stream in the turn towards new materialism is the idea, represented in the work of G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, B. Massumi, and S. Ahmed, among others, that affect should be conceived as a depersonalised force that circulates in the world (like weather) with its own material impact on individuals and the social environment.

Telò and Mueller have recognised the rich potential of the turn to new materialism for readings of Athenian tragedy. It is worth noting that Bennett herself looks to ancient Greek thought in her extensive discussion of the insistence on materialism by Epicurean metaphysics. More to the point, as the editors remark in their introduction (pp. 2–3), not only is theatrical performance, with its reliance on the materials of costumes, props and stage, in addition to its intense interest in the power of affect, a medium that is particularly apt for the application of theories emerging from new materialism; Athenian tragedy also presents us with evidence, in both its language and action, of its own awareness and exploration of the vibrancy of the material and affective environment. Thus, in the introduction, the editors lay out the theoretical background and programme of the volume:

The volume has its origins in a panel organised by the editors, titled ‘Objects and Affect: the Materialities of Greek Drama’, that was presented at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Society for Classical Studies in San Francisco, where some of the twelve chapters were first presented. These twelve fall roughly into those that focus on material objects in Athenian tragedy and those that explore the circulation of affect on and around the tragic stage.

V. Wohl's masterful ‘Stone into Smoke: Metaphor and Materiality in Euripides’ Troades’ treats the ‘zombie world’ of the play, in which ‘human and non-human are equally undead’, as a testing ground for Bennett's vibrant materialism, noting that Bennett neglects the role of language in the relationship between human and non-human, participating in both, without belonging completely to either. Wohl focuses in particular on the dynamics of metaphor in the language of the play, as it destabilises the categories of human and non-human even while emphasising how mutually alien they are. Language, like the smoke of Troy, is an unstable marker of the human inability to access the reality of things.

In ‘Morbid Materialism: the Matter of the Corpse in Euripides’ Alcestis’ K. Bassi notes that in tragedy, it is a living actor's body that plays the object of sensory and affective attention that is a dead corpse, and that this fact calls attention to the divide between living and non-living, as does the rigid tragic mask. Likewise, ‘[i]n animating the figures of myth and legend, tragic mimêsis blurs the strict ontological divide between the living and the dead’ (p. 36). Bassi draws on Bennett's vibrant materialism and B. Honig's critique of mortalist humanism in her reading of Alcestis, a play that challenges the divide between object and human, between corpse and living being.

J. Billings's ‘Orestes’ Urn in Word and Action’ observes that in the context of tragedy's self-reflexive interest in truth, falsehood and artistic illusion, props ‘are the only things on the tragic stage that actually are what they represent’. As a locus of coincidence of both the mythical world and physical space, they are ‘ontologically fraught’ (p. 49). In the cases of Philoctetes’ bow and Electra's urn, for example, the materiality of the objects, which are the focus of affect, conditions the falsity of language in stories shared among ‘friends’, language that in turn has an important material effect on the status of these onstage objects.

E. Weiberg, in ‘Weapons as Friends and Foes in Sophocles’ Ajax and Euripides’ Heracles’, engages with the work of J. Shay on moral injury and trauma as represented by heroes of Greek myth. Noting how Ajax and Heracles, both of whom suffer a loss of philia, address their weapons in the social terms of friend and foe, she compares how the suicide of the former ‘acts out’ his attempted slaughter of his comrades, while Heracles makes his weapon a friend rather than a foe and thus ‘works through’ his loss.

In ‘The Familiar Mask’ A.C. Duncan explores the tragic mask's vibrant materiality, both in the process of its making and in performance, where it is addressed in terms of the live body elements of face, head, eye etc., and argues that just as Athenians knew the performers behind the masks, they also knew the masks as familiars.

A. Shirazi, in ‘The Other Side of the Mirror: Reflection and Reversal in Euripides’ Hecuba’, turns her gaze to the play's reference to mirrors. Tragic mirrors as vibrant aesthetic and aestheticising objects located in supposedly safe domestic spaces are made horrific by the scenes they reflect, and they thus serve as analogues to tragedy's own aestheticisation of horror.

S. Estrin, in ‘Memory Incarnate: Material Objects and Private Visions in Classical Athens, from Euripides’ Ion to the Gravesite’, reads Euripides’ Ion in the context of the Greeks’ experiences of gravesites as materialisations of memory. As an art historian, he traces how the play mobilises material objects as mediators of memory and affect that are more than opportunities for ecphrastic description of visual objects; they can serve as touchstones or portals to past experiences.

In his intriguing chapter, ‘The Boon and the Woe: Friendship and the Ethics of Affect in Sophocles’ Philoctetes’, Telò suggests that affect, in its quality of ‘in-between-ness’ and its capacity to destabilise the opposition between subject and object, has an almost subjective potential to territorialise, assimilate and even consume another. Philoctetes’ eagerness that Neoptolemus share his responses can be read as an attempt to appropriate him, reducing him to sameness. This process is materialised and mediated through the bow, which takes on a sexualised charge in an eroticised triangulation with Philoctetes and Neoptolemus. The risk of Neoptolemus’ compassion is that he will be assimilated to Philoctetes and his disease.

A. Uhlig's delightful ‘Noses in the Orchestra: Bodies, Objects, and Affect in Sophocles’ Ichneutae’ explores the dramatisation of bodies altered by affect, as the satyrs, their bodies and postures literally shaped by scent, are transformed into bent-over tracking dogs, with noses to the ground. Invoking B. Latour's call for a new language of bodies that reflects the affective relationships that constitute our lived experience, and noting a similarity with ancient theories of perception as a form of contact between particles and sense organs, she traces the hybrid forms of the characters and props in the play as they transform one another through various forms of mutual impact, with the result that the distinctions between bodies and things are challenged.

In ‘Speaking Sights and Seen Sounds in Aeschylean Tragedy’ N. Weiss surveys examples of the conjuring ability of Aeschylean language to synaesthetically materialise objects and characters out of thin air. For example, she discusses how the Agamemnon’s early presentation of the beacon fires, which are described in language but invisible to the audience, endow them with the transformative power of both speech and action.

In ‘Electra, Orestes, and the Sibling Hand’ N. Worman ranges widely over the treatments in all three tragedians of the dynamics of touch in the encounters between Agamemnon's children. As a reference point, she begins with Oedipus, whose loss of sight magnifies the importance of his incestuous paternal and sibling touch. Alighting on numerous instances of manual contact, from Electra's tender handling of the deceptive urn to the repeated extension of hands into weapons, Worman shows how ‘these plays deploy manual contact to highlight intersections of sex and violence, which contribute centrally to the aesthetic and affective intensities of the action’ (p. 200).

Finally, E. Hall's ‘Materialisms Old and New’ is an eloquent and urgent calling out of new materialism's retreat from the Marxist insistence on attention to the role of human labour in the production of material things, however vibrant they may be. Bennett's ontological downgrading of the human, in the interest of an appreciation of the material, risks precluding a discussion of the role of labour, a discussion that is not nearly exhausted. In Greek mythical thought, an expression of maximum human labour conferred a kind of dangerous divinity on objects like Medea's fatal gifts or the crimson cloths of the Agamemnon. Surveying the fraught history of Marxist readings of Greek theatre, Hall suggests that these could be extended from a conditioned perspective of the new materialisms. Hall's chapter thus hearkens back to the cautionary note in the editors’ introduction, ‘While heeding her call to be attentive to things, the contributors to this volume at the same time question the vitalism and ethics of Bennett's vibrant materialism’ (p. 11).

This valuable collection almost without exception succeeds brilliantly in exemplifying the exhilarating range of potential in critical applications of the new materialisms to Athenian tragedy. At the same time, it does not shy away from some frank expressions of discomfort with the ethical risks inherent in the idea of matter as almost subjectively ‘vibrant’ or in the notion of the destabilising ‘in-between-ness’ of affect, theorising that could seem to justify the alleviation of human responsibility for our material and social environment. These readings of the Greek tragedies’ own complex engagement with matter and affect further suggest that some of the ‘new’ materialisms are not entirely as new as they may seem.