Hellenistic tragedy is generally no more than a footnote in survey works on Greek tragedy and Hellenistic poetry. This state of affairs is partly due to a persistent teleological/classicising approach to Greek tragedy, but primarily reflects the state of our evidence, which is scant, fragmented and difficult to navigate for non-specialists. K.-T.’s book does much to address this last issue. Reworking and expanding her Tragedia hellenistyczna (published in Polish in 2006), K.-T. presents the Greek text and translations of all testimonies for poets and surviving fragments of plays that can be plausibly dated between the late fourth and first centuries b.c., brief commentaries on this material and chapters that evaluate and contextualise the textual evidence. Although most of this evidence can also be found in volumes 1 and 2 of Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta (edd. B. Snell and R. Kannicht [1986, 1981]), K.-T. is, remarkably, the first to present and survey it as a corpus since F. Schramm's Tragicorum Graecorum hellenisticae, quae dicitur, aetatis fragmenta (1929), which excludes Ezekiel and lacks many of the papyrus finds that have enriched our knowledge about the development of tragedy and the Nachleben of the classical tragedians in the Hellenistic period.

Despite the book's title, K.-T. in practice covers not merely tragedy but all drama that is not explicitly identified as comedy. The wisdom of this approach becomes obvious when one engages with the fragments. It is remarkable how many of the plays for which we have evidence raise problems of generic labelling. For example, Sositheus' Daphnis (or Lityerses) may have been a satyr-play but, given the absence of concrete evidence for satyrs, it may also have been a romantic tragedy, a tragicomedy or any other label one might want to apply to a tragedy that was quite far from the classical norm (if perhaps not too different from Euripides' Alcestis, which stages Heracles in a similar role). If anything is clear from the surviving fragments and titles, it is that tragedy and satyr-play were not static in the Hellenistic period and no less innovative in their choice of topics, plots and language and in their generic blending than other types of poetry (partly produced by the same poets). We find, for example, plays on contemporary political topics (such as Lycophron's Cassandreians and Python's Agen) and historical events (Moschion's Men of Pherae and Themistocles) mixed in with mythological themes old and new, and it is clear that satyr-play to some extent claimed the niche of Old and Middle Comedy, with plays such as Lycophron's Menedemus and a drama by Sositheus that involved Cleanthes. Seen in this context our two best-known texts, Lycophron's monodrama Alexandra (well served by scholarship in recent years) and Ezekiel's Moses play (of which 269 lines survive), appear less eccentric than they do in isolation.

As clearly as it demonstrates drama's diversity, this book shows its importance in the Hellenistic world. K.-T. rightly emphasises that our evidence for the staging of Hellenistic drama and its place in society is as ample as the evidence for its scripts is scant. Most of our information about stage production in ancient literature and scholarship, of our epigraphic evidence for dramatic competitions, of our artistic representations of performances and of our material evidence for theatres relates to Hellenistic drama. K.-T. provides a good sense of this evidence in Chapter 1, ‘General Observations’, and Chapter 4, ‘The Staging of Hellenistic Tragedies’, which sandwich her presentation of the testimonies and fragments in the long Chapter 2, ‘Tragedians and the Tragedies,’ nearly 150 pages, and the shorter Chapter 3, ‘Hellenistic Tragedy with Biblical Themes’, and also through the images sprinkled throughout the book and a helpful catalogue of Hellenistic theatres provided as an appendix.

Calculating from the number of known theatres and average audience capacity, K.-T. estimates that a popular new play ‘could, in a short space of time, reach an audience of up to a million people’ (p. 3). The number is not as relevant as the scale, which has significant implications. We are dealing with a mass audience of theatre-goers who, in addition to enjoying performances of classical plays in various forms (with or without choral songs; in full, abridged or adapted; performed by companies large and small and even individual actors), came to view new plays written by playwrights who were, to a greater or lesser extent, poets of their time – not slavish imitators of classical forms, topics and themes.

This suggests that there is mileage in further research on this material, which K.-T.’s work will encourage and facilitate. Just how little critical attention has been paid to the remains of Hellenistic drama (beyond New Comedy) is evident throughout her discussions and footnotes, where references to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholarship abound and often dominate. The book is a guide also to this older scholarship, which can be as hard to track and navigate as the primary sources. K.-T. helpfully summarises existing arguments and interpretations, offers new observations and hypotheses along the way, takes firm positions where she feels the evidence warrants them (for example, regarding the survival of the chorus), and she cautions against over-interpretation of the evidence throughout.

The nature of this evidence implies that there is, despite all caution, sufficient room for disagreement about matters great and small. I would have liked to see, in the footnotes to the discursive chapters, more direct references to primary sources (rather than just modern scholarship) to provide a better sense of the evidence on which assertions are based. This would, for example, have revealed that the Tragoidoumena of Demaratus/Damagetus (p. 13) are only mentioned in the ps.-Plutarchan On Rivers, a work riddled with bogus citations. I found it easy, however, to step over any disagreements and doubts, as K.-T.’s work facilitates a kind of engagement with Hellenistic tragedy that was previously impossible. To me it suggested numerous directions to be explored, hypotheses to be tested and connections to be analysed. Others interested in Hellenistic society, Hellenistic poetry and post-classical drama and performance culture are likely to find this book equally useful and stimulating, and many may want to own it.

The book has some presentational issues, concerning, for example, the Greek texts (sub/adscript iota, capitalisation, typos, accents), conventions (both ‘Ath.’ and ‘Athen.’ for Athenaeus), punctuation in translations (e.g. p. 61 F5, p. 82 F5.4, p. 93 T1.3, p. 94 T2.3, p. 97 Σ Theoc. 8 arg. b), orphaned fragment headings (e.g. pp. 54, 64, 74, 105) and other small imperfections. These do not affect the substance, but it would be welcome if the publisher could allow minor corrections to address them in a second edition.