With this volume B. adds another magnificent beast to a stable already inhabited by six other handsome animals of a similar species: omnibus commentaries-cum-translations-cum-introductions, that of the present volume being tantamount to a slim but formidable (partly previously published) independent volume of 143 pages. The more recently each specimen was born, the more robust they become in weight and character. Excluding the earlier commentary and translation of the Troades (1994), at 250 pages, each Oxford volume is bigger than the last: both published in 2011, B.'s Oedipus and Octavia are around 430 pages (commentary 266, 207, respectively), the Medea of 2014 is 481 (commentary 295), the Thyestes of 2017 is 561 (commentary 362), and the volume under review is 600 (commentary 400).

The introduction contains all the now-expected features, many reprinted verbatim from previous volumes, with sometimes only slight modifications which, though they leave experienced readers unsure where to pay attention, are useful syntheses of B.'s comprehensive work, from which any graduate student or scholar new to Senecan tragedy will derive all that they need to understand its sophistication.Footnote ¹ A good example of this mix of redundancy, novelty and utility is the overview of Seneca's On anger (pp. lvii–lxiv). Extremely useful, as it was in the previous volumes, it breaks the treatise down into 34 propositions (pp. lvii–lxiv) and then offers a brief application to the Agamemnon (p. lxiv). As it does in the other editions, the metre of the English translation faithfully signals changes in the Latin in a line-by-line rendering: Latin iambic trimeters appear in something resembling blank verse or iambic pentameters (p. cxliv: ‘there is no real alternative’); choral odes have a rolling rhythm, which recalls the anapests that often dominate them (I underline the places where the rhythm rolls in this example: ‘Not só in Eúxine's depths / Do túrbulent bíllows swell / Near snówy póles’, ll. 66–8; see further pp. 250–1, 350). One practical feature, present in B.'s other editions, but so useful it is worth highlighting, are the bilingual lemmata (e.g. p. 211, on ll. 208–12: ‘quamuis … armasset / Though … armed’, explaining a concessive construction). As with the other Oxford volumes, the edition includes a dense eight pages of ‘Selective Critical Apparatus’, analyses of metre for every ode (albeit too compressed for easy use: contrast D. Christenson's 2020, 144–6 eusynoptic presentation in Plautus’ near-equivalents). The index is thorough, though largely topical (modern scholars rarely appear,). Every choral ode and/or new act elicits a short essay (usually 2–3 pages).

At 400 pages, the commentary is an ocean where, as D. Feeney (in ‘Their bits without her bits’, review of R.G.M. Nisbet and N. Rudd, A Commentary on Horace Odes Book 3, TLS October 8 [2004], 8) says of Nisbet and Rudd, ‘the actual text floats on the surface of each page … trailing columns of dense exegetical foliage’. Including all the pearls of rhetorical devices and parallels from Latin literature from the mid-republic to the Flavian period, the seagrass of exegesis contains more than a few undiscovered continents. B. carefully charts the Agamemnon's ‘Roman referentiality’ (p. 154), when Latin words or Graeco-Roman mythemes bring it home to Roman readers (pp. 99, 107–8, 152–4, 195–6, 230–1, 301, 404, 417, 427–8, 434, 458–9, 474). Less dynamic but no less useful are the parallels with Stoic philosophy, often identified through intertextuality from Seneca's prose (pp. 119–24, 143–4, 148–50, 178–82, 209, 217–18, 223–4 [cf. 472–3], 233–4, 337–8, 455). I say ‘less dynamic’ because, like the syncrisis of the Agamemnon and On Anger in the introduction, B. usually marks one-way correspondences, where passages in the poetry illustrate the philosophy (contrast, e.g., A. Schiesaro, The Passions in Play [2003], pp. 20–5; but see B., pp. xix–xx). Most provocative and productive for Anglo-American readers will be the references to staging.Footnote ² B. supports the often-speculative reconstruction (p. 410: ‘this is a possible, if not necessary, implication’) with copious references to reception from better attested Euro-American theatrical traditions, putting the otherwise overwhelming lists of later European parallels to practical ends (pp. 104–5, 127, 131, 135–7, 217, 225, 230–1, 234–5, 242–3, 259–60, 262–3, 389–90, 481–3).

Even where B. misses opportunities to engage in more recent scholarship – when for instance, ‘Roman referentiality’ excludes much discussion of Roman gender, something that a play with primarily female roles encourages, or when philosophy excludes much talk of exemplarity, Seneca's preferred mode of doing philosophyFootnote ³ –, B. nevertheless signposts the issue and says something worth reading.Footnote ⁴ Instead of such direct engagements with more recent scholarship on Roman culture and philosophy, B. exhibits that emulous appreciation historically endemic to the commentary as a genre: aemulatio or the sense of rivalry (C.S. Kraus, ‘Introduction: Reading Commentaries/Commentaries as Reading’, in R. Gibson and C.S. Kraus [edd.], The Classical Commentary [2002], pp. 16–17), from which commentators defend their author against previous commentators (e.g. R. Tarrant, Seneca: Agamemnon [1976]; in B., pp. 288–9, 448). Since B. reproduces the best of Tarrant's edition and will surely replace it, the scholarly point of this quarrelling over ‘typically Senecan neglect’ (e.g. Tarrant [1976], 335 = B., p. 448) is unclear.

These defences are more than usually palpable symptoms or expressions of another affective feature of the ‘classical commentary’: namely, the desire of the commentator – that is, the ‘meta-narrative’ or ‘story told about, and around, a text’, constituted by ‘the plurality of meaning(s) inevitably opened’ in ‘the very process of answering’ questions raised by the commentator (Kraus [2002], p. 9). Against the background of B.'s other volumes, which keep coming out and keep getting bigger, the desire expressed in the compounded plurality of each edition appears to have two objects: first, a desideratum of scholarship, the dramatic conditions of Senecan performance in the first century ce; second, a desideratum of the scholar, a readership for whom debates about such performances remain a desideratum. Production choices (a bloodbag bursts; pp. lii, 484), aesthetic judgements (‘a brilliant line’; p. 104) and ironic reflections on Roman history (‘Seneca's audience were well aware of the political half of this “truth”’; p. 230) may or may not be ‘true’ or even verifiable; they nevertheless reconstitute an atmosphere of performance and spectatorship deriving directly from imperial Rome. Alongside all these ‘pearls’, then, the reader also encounters, as a result of an affect of cultural contestation, an atmosphere of Roman theatrical culture, even if such an atmosphere never existed (though something like it must have existed). More than any plurality of ‘facts’ about Senecan tragedy, this atmosphere is the real distinguishing feature of B.'s work and the greatest reward for the (diligent and persistent) reader.