This is a careful, comprehensive work, full of observations about fifteen Greek tragedies, but lacking any powerfully original or synoptic thesis about Greek morality and the significance of moral awareness for the authors, characters or audiences of tragedy.

L. describes the focus of his book as ‘the moral awareness of significant agents in Greek tragedy’ (p. 1). To that end, he proposes a definition of morality, identifies the conditions that he thinks need to be met in order for an agent to display moral awareness and then examines the extent to which agents display moral awareness in a series of tragedies, including: Seven Against Thebes, Agamemnon, Choephori, Eumenides (Aeschylus); Ajax, Trachiniae, Oedipus Tyrannus, Electra, Philoctetes (Sophocles); and Medea, Hecuba, Hippolytus, Heracles, Electra, Bacchae (Euripides). The examinations are somewhat formulaic. Essentially, L. maintains that self-consciousness implies a conception of self, a conception of self implies the possibility of moral autonomy, autonomy implies recognition of moral responsibility, and recognition of moral responsibility implies moral awareness. Therefore, examining the awareness of self of a character opens a door to the examination of the moral awareness displayed by that character, the moral awareness displayed in that play and even, to some extent, the moral awareness of the dramatist.

There is a substantial introduction covering themes from morality and tragedy in general (with particular focus on the concept of the self in tragedy), followed by a chapter on moral autonomy and divine intervention. These preliminary chapters are appropriately circumspect; they are devoted more to showing the range of issues that complicate understanding than they are to a theoretical view about self, autonomy or divine intervention. The preliminaries are followed by individual chapters on each of the tragedies mentioned above, and the book is rounded off by a summary of L.'s observations. An index of passages would have been useful, but is not included.

A central task of a book like this must be to explain what is meant by ‘moral awareness’, with particular reference to the distinction between a character (or dramatist or, in a sense, a dramatic work) displaying what we might consider to be awareness of a specifically moral kind, and a character (or dramatist or dramatic work) displaying what they themselves regard to be awareness of a specifically moral kind. L. comes up short here. He adopts (without explanation) B. Gert's definition of morality as ‘an informal public system applying to all rational persons, governing behaviour that affects others, and includes what are commonly known as the moral rules, ideals and virtues and has the lessening of evil or harm as its goal’ (B. Gert, Morality: its Nature and Justification [1998], p. 13), but he does not actually apply this definition to his analysis of the tragedies. Whereas Gert describes a ‘public system applying to all’ (evidently appealing in some way to the criterion of universality typical in philosophers' definitions of morality), L. generally speaks in terms of the personal morality of a character (Medea's morality, Ajax's morality), or the morality of a particular drama (which, he cautions, might be different from the morality of another drama by the same author). Ultimately, for L., the source of an agent's ‘moral awareness’ is not a conception of universal requirements, but a conception of self and a felt need to be true to that conception. This is much weaker than what most philosophers would regard as moral awareness. It amounts to a conception of personal integrity (i.e. agents' awareness of and commitment to the values or ideals they stand for) that is consistent with moral, immoral and amoral dispositions.

Looking past the unfulfilled promise of the book's title, there is still much value to be found in the individual discussions of the tragedies. One finds, for example, a rich and illuminating discussion of the shield scene in Seven Against Thebes (Chapter 3), in which potential difficulties about fate and character are overcome through the resolution of Eteocles to act according to his own self-definition and the responsibilities he accepts in virtue of his history and station. Or, to take another example, in L.'s discussion of Oedipus Tyrannus there is a finely drawn picture of the Sophoclean agent, who finds himself in an ‘epistemologically problematical world’ (p. 155), unable to deliberate his actions rationally and yet somehow retaining a sense of moral nobility all the same. Finally, L.'s discussion of Euripides' Medea emphasises Medea's moral failings according to her own conception of morality, including the problematic realisation that the source of her ‘morality’ is ‘nothing more than a rationalization of her vindictive feelings’ (p. 211).

Beyond the value of these individual discussions, however, L.'s criterion of selection remains somewhat problematical. He states simply that he has chosen the plays that ‘will yield the most illuminating answers to the questions which our investigation raises’ (p. 28). Yet because the examination of each work is self-contained, it is not clear that the answers are the most illuminating ones for the questions about moral awareness in Greek tragedy; they are just the answers for those particular plays. Thus the omission of Antigone and Orestes is not fully justified by the claims that there is ‘little to add’ (p. 28) to existing analyses of Antigone, or that Orestes ‘is an inadequate moral agent’ (p. 29). It would be useful to know how these plays fit into an overall view of moral awareness.

L. might have addressed the selection problem through a concluding chapter that put together all the answers in a way that shed light on Greek tragedy as a whole, or in a way that contrasted the major dramatists in terms of their different attitudes to moral awareness, or in a way that examined the influence of moral awareness in Greek tragedy on Greek moral philosophy. But apart from incidental statements along these lines, there is no attempt to derive synoptic conclusions – the book simply ends with summaries of the individual conclusions derived along the way. Where L. does draw some general conclusions, they tend to be troubling overstatements. For example, L. maintains that ‘it never occurred to serious thinkers to divorce happiness from virtue’ (p. 308), and makes his position circular by baldly asserting that one obvious counter-example, Thrasymachus, ‘is not a serious thinker’ (p. 308 n. 1). Yet even if Thrasymachus himself were not a serious thinker (a claim that can be disputed), Plato recognises his thought as serious, as is shown by the fact that he spends nine books of the Republic responding to it.

This book contains many individual insights about specific moments in specific tragedies, but will be a disappointment to philosophers, who might have turned to it for insight about moral philosophy in Greek tragedy, and it may be a disappointment to Classicists or ancient historians looking for insight about tragedy as a cultural production.