Academics have a professional need to be published; publishers have a commercial incentive to create demand. In recent years these convergent interests have released a flood of edited volumes, not all of which can demonstrate a compelling claim to intrinsic or lasting scholarly importance. So it is reassuring to be reminded that a publishing house that contributes liberally, if not recklessly, to the flood continues to produce heavyweight volumes of unquestionable scholarly importance. Consider, for example, the new edition of the Thucydides scholia,Footnote ¹ on which Alexander Kleinlogel worked from 1960 until a few months before his death on 1 January 2007. The complex task of bringing his material to publishable form was undertaken by Klaus Alpers; illness prevented Alpers from steering the volume through its final stages, which were overseen by Stefano Valente. The introduction comprises 202 pages (the chapter on transmission is incomplete, breaking off after four pages); the lavish edition of the scholia vetera occupies 705 pages. The material for a projected second volume containing the scholia recentiora was not left in a publishable state, except for the Lexicon Patmense, which is included as a forty-eight-page appendix to the present volume's introduction. Reviewing Karl Hude's Teubner edition of the scholia, published in 1927, H. T. Deas concluded: ‘obviously this is work which will not require to be done again. Indeed, were it not a praiseworthy task for the sake of completeness, one might be permitted to doubt whether it was worth doing at all’ (CR 42 [1928], 145–6). That reminder of the extremes of fallibility should strike terror into every reviewer's soul.

It is therefore with some nervousness that I suggest that Helena Schmedt's edition and commentary on Antonius Diogenes’ fragmentary account of incredible things beyond Thule,Footnote ² though unquestionably worth doing and in its way an impressive piece of scholarship, would have been a better book if it had not been such a weighty volume. A dissertation is essentially a credentialing exercise; a scholarly book should be an exercise in communication. Schmedt amply demonstrates her scholarly credentials, documenting with impressive versatility and thoroughness what predecessors have said about the fragments of AD (as Schmedt designates her author) and subjecting their contributions to a rigorous critical assessment. But the substance and originality of her own contribution is too easily obscured. Still, we have what we have: and what we have is worth having. After a brief introduction, two chapters provide a text and translation of the testimonia, with commentary, and an edition of the papyrus fragments, with commentary. Subsequent chapters deal with language and style, genre (very briefly), relations to other texts and authors, philosophy and cult, and themes.

The advantages of giving a dissertation time to mature into a book are evident from my next two exhibits. Militant frogs and mice last claimed space in these reviews two years ago, in a surprising, and (as it turned out) poorly executed, edition for ‘intermediate and early-advanced’ students (G&R 65 [2018], 242–3). Matthew HostyFootnote ³ has a more sophisticated readership in view, and has had more success in executing his edition of the Batrachomyomachia – or Batrachomachia: the shorter form of the title is probably more authentic (2–3, 32). The text, with facing translation in a Lattimore-inspired six-beat line, is accompanied by an 81-page introduction and 150 pages of commentary. Hosty begins in combative style, challenging the label ‘parody’ and protesting at the poem's reduction to ‘an isolated curio’ (1–2). Under ‘Date and Authorship’ (2–14), he recruits a third- or second-century bc relief depicting ‘two mice nibbling at the foot of Homer's throne’ (9) to support his argument for the poem as a product of ‘the late third century or very early second century bc – only a little later, if not contemporary with, Callimachus’ (11). The plausible suggestion that the poem was first published under Homer's name is cautiously buried in a lengthy footnote (20 n. 33). ‘Parody and Parodia’ (14–21) returns to the initial challenge, peeling away the word's modern connotations and explaining its ancient usage. ‘Frogs and Mice’ (21–33) reviews the role of these creatures in the fabular tradition. The award for least-expected item of supporting evidence goes to reported photographs of a mouse riding on the back of a frog during an Indian flood (25 n. 43). There is a detailed examination of ‘Language, Metre, and Style’ (33–47). ‘Reception and Influence’ (47–62) reveals a far more extensive reach, especially from the eleventh century, than I would have imagined. It is pleasing to learn that ‘the first author we find making really systematic use’ of the poem is Gregory of Nazianzus (48–9). Gregory, Archbishop of Constantinople and revered by Orthodox (and other) Christians as ‘the Theologian’ on account of his dedicated defence of the Nicene faith, was also a prolific poet; he is named eight times in the commentary. From ‘Text and Transmission’ (62–81) we learn that ‘there are at least as many extant MSS of the BM as there are of the Odyssey, and possibly more’ (62, with n. 113). Hosty approaches the problematic textual tradition with due caution: ‘I have aimed to preserve rather than to rebuild’ (65). The commentary is detailed, informative, and consistently well argued. An excursion into batrachian taxonomy that aims to answer the question ‘what sort of frog is Physignathus?’ (131–2) illustrates his attention to detail. He also succeeds in drawing out the poem's humour, which is (I now see) much cleverer than I had supposed. Pleasingly, the humour sometimes leaks into the commentary: ‘A broad bean pod is far too long to provide greaves for a single mouse, which explains why further crafting is required (126) and also makes Barnes’ conjecture…less likely’ (182).

Lucy Jackson's investigation of the chorus in fourth-century dramaFootnote ⁴ has benefited from an even longer period of transformation from thesis to book. ‘There are’, as she says without exaggeration, ‘some real challenges to performing such a study’: that is, a study of ‘the activity and immediate reception of the fourth-century dramatic chorus’, which ‘remains entirely unexamined’ (2). That is indeed a challenging project: but ‘to confront the alleged swift decline of the dramatic chorus is to confront our own current models for evaluating Attic drama and its choruses’ (11). The prime exhibit for the chorus's continuing importance in fourth-century tragedy is inevitably Rhesus, from which Jackson develops a strong case (53–69); fragments from fourth-century drama support that case, even if they cannot strongly reinforce it (69–77). Fourth-century performances of fifth-century tragedies provide further evidence. The term ‘reperformance’ (17 n. 7), which implies the replication of an original production rather than a new staging, is rightly deprecated. Revival, a preferable term, may involve the adaptation of a base text, and Jackson persuasively interprets Seven Against Thebes as a fourth-century adaptation in which new choral material (102–11) contributes to ‘a truly stunning reshaping of the play's themes’ (244). A brief reminder of the continuing vitality of non-dramatic choral lyric in the fourth century (77–81) is developed at length in Chapters 6 and 7, which examine festival choruses and (drawing on Xenophon and Plato) their social salience. In her discussion of the term embolimon, ‘used by Aristotle to describe the quality of some choral parts of tragedy’ (she rightly refuses to conflate this term with the ‘textual shorthand’ khorou, 148), Jackson sees a possible reductio ad absurdum argument (153), oblivious to Aristotle's barbed sense of humour. I protest in passing at the idea that Aristotle applies a ‘biologically-informed model’ to the history of tragedy (156), a pervasive but nonsensical cliché. Did Aristotle's understanding of, for example, water being brought to the boil over a fire and cooling as the fire burns out depend on a ‘penchant for biologically-informed narratives of growth, acme, and decline’ (6, my emphasis)? Furthermore, Aristotle's understanding of parts and wholes is not fully ‘defined’ (154) in Poet. 1450b25–7: see, in more detail, Metaphysics 5.6, 16, and 20. (And while I'm in a critical mood: ‘Polydius’ [78] is the name of a genus of weevil, to which the poet Polyidus was not related.) Jackson emphasizes in conclusion that her focus on fourth-century evidence ‘is more to address a gap in scholarship than to claim there is something unique to fourth-century theatre and its choruses’ (245): the diversity of choral activity and dramatic practice evidenced in the fourth century may have been present already in the fifth century. That conjecture is convergent with the increasing body of evidence for greater diversity in fifth-century drama than is reflected in the canonical selection of extant plays. This book is an important contribution to our understanding of the hidden history of Greek drama.

My last two exhibits prove that edited volumes can have a compelling claim to scholarly attention. The first is a collection of thirteen papers on ancient Greek narrative and aesthetic experience, with a brief introduction providing helpful orientation.Footnote ⁵ A focus on the embodied, enactive, and immersive experience of narrative, drawing on the resources of diverse strands of current cognitive science, supersedes taxonomic narratology, and the affective dimension of narrative is affirmed against an academic tradition characterized by ‘an obsession with…sociopolitical contexts’ (37). Needless to say, I am sympathetic to these developments. Rutger Allan's chapter on narrative immersion is a must-read, though it starts with a literal falsehood: ‘the reader sees what the characters see, thinks what the characters think, feels what the characters feel’ (15) – the ‘up to a point’ qualification comes on the next page, in the hoary form of ‘a willing suspension of disbelief’ (16). Few people would willingly feel what Philoctetes feels in his agonies: but the reader's or viewer's distantiation has nothing to do with a suspension of disbelief. A subtler approach is taken by Felix Budelmann and Evert van Emde Boas in their chapter on tragic messenger speeches, analysing ‘three foci of audience attention’ (60–1): an audience member may be immersed in an actor's ‘mesmerizing display of skill’ as he delivers a messenger speech, or in ‘the psychological drama that unfolds onstage as the messenger reveals his news’, or they may be drawn into the offstage world ‘conjured’ by a messenger's narrative. Lisa Hau mounts a sensitive defence of ‘sensationalist’ narratives in Hellenistic historiography, but falters on rhetoric: ‘Agatharchides seems to believe…that the victims deserve an emotional rather than rhetorical tribute’ (94, my emphasis). Rhetoric and emotion are not antithetical: emotion is one of Aristotle's three means of persuasion. Agatharchides’ criticism relates to rhetoric that is faulty precisely because of its failure to evoke an emotional response that does justice to the facts. Aldo Tagliabue gives a penetrating analysis of the Visions in the Shepherd of Hermas, drawing narrative and ecclesiology together: ‘the manifest and spiritual Churches…are respectively characterized by sequential human time and divine timelessness’ (106); ‘if success means intensity, the narrative and enactive sections must be considered more successful…However, if success means evocative power, non-sequential form wins out…the everlasting pattern of repetitions belongs to an alternative and more subtle reading of the narrative’ (126). Jonas Grethlein's chapter on Heliodorus is concerned with ‘the residuum of reflection that distinguishes aesthetic illusion from delusion. Without it, aesthetic experience would be identical with real experience, narrative would be indistinguishable from life’ (135). Residual reflection therefore effects the distinction between delusion and aesthetic illusion/aesthetic experience/narrative, and between that triad and ‘life’. I think I agree: but the point could, perhaps, have been expressed more lucidly. Caspar de Jonge focuses on ekstasis and related states in the (so-called) Ps.-Longinus, as experienced by author/performer, by audience, and ‘also – in a different way – the text and its linguistic or stylistic organization’ (149): textual disorder mirrors disturbance of mind. He acknowledges that Longinus’ ‘ecstasy’ involves judgement (152), and that Longinus’ terminology is metaphorical (153–4) – though only ‘in the end’ (154): that seems to imply an initial ecstasy morphing into metaphor at the point of delivery. Yet he acknowledges that ‘ecstasy is controlled by art’ (157): if so, the ecstasy is an artefact – a product of tekhnē – from beginning to end. That is what we expect of a supremely skilful rhetorician who aims to show his readers how they can raise their rhetorical skills to the highest possible level (Subl. 1.3). It is therefore essential that those readers are not carried away in a frenzy: to learn what Longinus has to teach them, they need to observe and analyse the techniques he demonstrates. Some of those techniques are very subtle (e.g. 39.4); and, contrary to the claim that ‘Ps.-Longinus’ theory of the sublime always focuses on short moments and specific highlights’ (171), Longinus did not cease to be concerned with sublimity in the 193-word collage (32.5–6) that is an extended allusion to a 6,800-word passage in Plato's Timaeus (65c–85e). Luuk Huitink, on enargeia and bodily mimesis, observes that ‘we do not primarily see a cup as a thing with a certain shape and colour, but as something we can grasp in a certain way, take a sip from, and so on’ (192): a view anticipated by J. J. Gibson, in his Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979), and perhaps also by Aristotle's ‘incidental’ objects of perception. In the ‘light’ of the relatively recent scientific awareness of the phenomenon of aphantasia, and in ‘view’ of my own aphantasic tendencies, I wonder what enargeia meant to antique aphantasics. Laura Gianvittorio-Ungar suggests that the first staging of Seven Against Thebes involved a solo weapons dance concurrent with the parodos – the soloist signifying the military threat. To my surprise, I found this hypothesis entirely plausible. This volume provides too many stimulating points of departure for every contributor to figure in this brief review: but every contributor has earned their place.

And, finally, Liddell and Scott (LS):Footnote ⁶ twenty-one chapters, orchestrated by Christopher Stray, Michael Clarke, and Joshua T. Katz, exploring the history, methodology, and languages of ‘the world's leading lexicon of Ancient Greek’ in its multiple incarnations. Stray provides background: LS's predecessors and competitors, its intellectual, theological, and historical context, and its publication history. Margaret Williamson looks at the English registers adopted by its competitors: LS's avoidance of Latinate vocabulary in favour of archaic English is a persistent fault. David Butterfield surveys the various uses of Latin, including (of course) the glossing of obscenities (55–8); the main treatment of obscenity is assigned to Amy Coker. Joshua Katz examines etymological material (‘Roderick Mackenzie…deserves credit for largely keeping etymological nonsense out of the work’, 95), while Brent Vine gives brief treatment to the inclusion of Mycenaean Greek. Separate specialized dictionaries would be more realistic: dealing with etymological or Mycenaean material systematically in a lexicon of this scale is impossible. Hesiod is the subject of Tom Mackenzie's absorbing case study of the treatment of a single author. Christopher Rowe observes ‘the mismatch between Plato's flexibility and the demand of “dictionary definition”’ (129) – an accurate observation, but an unreasonable complaint: a lexicon is not a feasible forum for sophisticated philosophical exegesis, especially of a philosopher as elusive as Plato. ‘If the one-sidedness of the lexicon's Plato resembles Aristotle's, that is because in many important respects the Lexicon's Plato is derived directly, and deliberately, from the Plato of Aristotle’ (140): one can see why this was so. But Aristotle's Aristotle has also been reductively processed on admission to LS: how it could be otherwise? Elizabeth Craik surveys medical vocabulary, especially the Hippocratic corpus. Patrick James judges the treatment of New Testament Greek as ‘superficial, shoddy, shambolic’ (180): the supporting evidence provided is more than enough to confirm the verdict. Mark Janse envisages an online LS with ‘the addition, wherever relevant, of brief references to the semantic and/or grammatical development of particular words in Medieval and/or Modern Greek’ (183) – a proposal that would massively compound the problems already posed by etymologies and Mycenaean Greek. Philomena Probert subjects the treatment of dialects to minute examination. Evelien Bracke's case study of mētis rehearses familiar flaws in Detienne and Vernant, but her insistence that a positive translation of mētis ‘must be avoided’ (241) rests on the disputable premise that deviousness is inherently negative. Michael Clarke's suggestion that a replacement for LS is inhibited by ‘fear of seeming presumptuous or arrogant in challenging the authority of a book that one was taught to trust’ (247) overestimates the reverentiality of classicists and underestimates the challenge of finding a practical alternative. ‘If the lexicon is to function successfully…it must attempt mappings between world-pictures, acknowledging the need to explain the ancient realities as a system of thought that must be studied sensitively before its lexical forms can be understood’ (266): for a lexicon of moderate scale (relative to the corpus it covers) that is not a feasible solution. David Goldstein illustrates LS's ‘outdated quality’ in relation to particles, with γε as case study. Certainly, particles ‘are worthy of (and will repay) serious investigation’, and their treatment in LS lags woefully behind ‘twenty-first-century standards’ (287). It remains unclear, however, how those standards could be implemented in a usable lexicon. James Clackson writes with a similar detachment from practicality:

Michael Silk's long, dense, erudite, self-referential, and penetrating reflections on ‘literary lexicography’ highlight inter alia the problems arising from the skewed evidence of ancient Greek, compounded by LS's unhelpfully skewed selection of evidence: ‘of all possible skewings, the one that tends to minimize the evidence of the plainest prose is the most questionable’ (310). His chapter comes closest to a vision of a revised LS (as distinct from one starting from scratch), and has the unique merit of concluding with twenty ‘practical recommendations’ (326–8). He offers two sample entries: implementing them at scale would not be easy. It is, I think, not mere coincidence that Michael Meier-Brügger, who directed the Lexikon des frühgriechischen Epos for seventeen years, recognizes LS's shortcomings while acknowledging that it is ‘still the best available Greek–English lexicon, the one from which we should begin and to which we must all add new insights as they become available’ (338). ‘There are not many classicists who have read all forty-eight books of Nonnus’ Dionysiaca, and even fewer who have been paid for it’ (339): what a pleasure it is to relish once more the unmistakeable voice of Martin West! Whether he also read the Paraphrase in its entirety is unrecorded; but, if so, there was no remuneration: the Paraphrase had been exiled to Lampe's Patristic Greek Lexicon. Crönert's 1913 revision of Passow ‘is of course not up to date with more recent discoveries, and it has the rather more serious deficiency that it never got beyond ἀνά’ (340). The four specimen entries which West submits to illustrate a Poetic Lexicon of Classical Greek (one of a hypothetical flotilla of specialist lexica) go from ἆ to ἄτη: slightly further than Crönert, but with notable gaps. West's sober judgement is that LS ‘has no serious rival and is unlikely ever to have one’ (341). Contrast Anne Thompson, using βάπτω to illustrate ‘the state of our ancient Greek dictionaries’ (392): rightly concluding that ‘dictionaries do not very accurately reflect what there is to be known’, she makes the utopian demand that ‘there needs to be a completely new start’ (393). John Considine, a contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary, reviews its debt to Liddell and Scott, and the reasons why it had to take a different direction.