To undertake a study of Aeschylean satyr play is to enter waters murky with unknowns: about early tragedy, satyr drama, dramaturgy, genre, generic expectations and reception among Athenian audiences. If we trawl those waters for discrete answers through traditional modes of inquiry, we risk nabbing some Proteus (unfortunately not much of Proteus) who will never give up his truths, however vice-like our grasp. Indeed, we should heed Lyndsay Coo and Anna Uhlig’s encouragement that we ‘chart a course between caution and imagination’ (2).

To be sure, these waters can yield some profit: fuller digestion of extant material, a map of a shifty scholarly landscape and the generation and refinement of the field’s methods and modes of inquiry. Lyndsay Coo, Anna Uhlig and the authors of the included studies have shown some (but not all) of this benefit. Where Proteus rears his changeful head in this short collection of essays, it results more from under-defined analytic language than a mishandling of evidence. On the latter count, both the editors and the authors of the studies do admirable work charting a thoughtful course.

Indeed, my largest complaint is how use of certain terminology and jargon, beginning with the volume’s introduction, tantalizes. For example, in discussing the origins of the three-plus-one format in Dionysiac tetralogies, Coo and Uhlig argue that the satyr chorus’ ‘dramatic carnality’ constituted ‘an important component of theatrical performance in fifth-century Athens’ (1). What ‘dramatic carnality’ entails, even if we know how satyrs tended to act in the mythic cosmos, remains opaque. Do the authors mean that the satyrs’ licentiousness itself had an essential dramaturgic or narrative function? Or was their presence alone as unfettered, amoral eroticism-made-flesh somehow a prerequisite of the theatrical experience? If dramatic carnality, in every sense of the phrase, served as a counterpoise to the more spectral and repressed psycho-sexual dramas of tragedy, then that is a fine point that should be made more precisely.

Relatedly, a monolithic definition of central terms is often assumed, which means that non-specialists might find themselves, as Idid, somewhat disorientated from the outset. For example, what is ‘our definition of classical tragedy’ (1) that the statistical ubiquity of satyr dramas somehow destabilizes?

These mild complaints lodged, Ipraise the editors and authors for striking a balance between discussion of individual plays and broader interrogation of satyr play’s genre, character, dramaturgy and ancient reception.

Lyndsay Coo’s (11–28) chapter on the relationship of the satyr play to the tragedies it accompanies proves subtle. She examines how the satyr play’s chronologic aspect rewrites in complicated ways the audience’s psychological response (the author refers to the satyr play’s ‘emotional positioning within the tetralogy’ (12)) to the tragedies they have just watched and to the tetralogy as a whole. Her digestion of the scholarly conversations around the Sphinx (the satyr play that accompanied Aeschylus’ Laius, Oedipus and the extant Seven Against Thebes) is masterful, and her evocation of the Sphinx’s nostalgic effects is compelling. She has succeeded in advancing a discussion of exactly how tragedy and satyr play mutually intensify one another. Rebecca Lämmle’s (29–48) study of the precarity of choreia (choral dance and its accompanying music) in satyr play offers a nice complement to Coo’s chapter by introducing another analytic complication: how satyric choruses themselves are, in turn, disdained for their activity, chastised for their dereliction of choral duty and mired in poetic aporia resulting from antagonistic relationships (with the dramatic action, with tragic choreia and with themselves).

Patrick O’Sullivan’s (49–66) close study of the elusive Diktyoulkoi (‘Net-haulers’), which deals with the arrival of Danae and Perseus at Seriphos, succeeds in helping us evaluate the paradigm of the satyr chorus as buffoonish in their licentiousness and to take seriously the gravity of some of their threats of sexual violence. Oliver Thomas’ (67–79) discussion of the Theoroi (‘Festival Delegates’, also known as the Isthmiastai (‘Participants at the Isthmia’)) likewise interrogates how the chorus of satyrs becomes involved in a meta-generic, meta-theatric (r)evolution and poses several fun questions about representation, ritual role playing (in the context of the Dionysia) and Aeschylean self-referentiality.

Anna Uhlig’s (81–96) examination of slaves and slavery in Aeschylean satyr play adds some welcome texture to our understanding of the functional grammar of slavery (and class) in fifth-century Athens; Iwould like to see more attention to how that grammar seeps into everyday speech. (For example, are the satyrs at Euripides’ Cyclops 708–09 about to be enslaved to Dionysus now that they have been manumitted from Polyphemus? Or are they just going to get drunk? Does the distinction matter?)

Finally, Paul Touz (97–117) offers a subtle explication of Aeschylus’ pre-eminent status as a satyr dramatist in ancient reception, namely that it was coextensive with ‘his image as the father of tragedy’ (97), which is somewhat paradoxical, given the increasing preference for Euripides’ and Sophocles’ tragic output as early as the last quarter of the fifth century.

In sum, this is a provocative volume: it contains much fruit for the student of ancient drama, Aeschylus and fifth-century Athenian mentalité, but the editors and authors could have better facilitated collection of that fruit.