This book is a revision of I.'s 2017 Göttingen dissertation. While the title's promise of a focus on tragedy is ultimately fulfilled, I. begins, after brief theoretical remarks and a description of her project (Chapter 1), with chapters devoted to relevant archaic and classical poetry (epic in Chapter 2, lyric in Chapter 3), prose from Pherecydes of Athens to Hyginus (Chapter 4) and a selection of visual art (Chapter 5). The five chapters of Part 2 then proceed, mostly chronologically, through the relevant plays and fragments of Aeschylus (Seven against Thebes and its companion plays Laius, Oedipus and Sphinx), Sophocles (Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus), Euripides (Oedipus in the long Chapter 8, Phoenician Women in Chapter 9) and the so-called minor tragedians (including adespota). Part 3 has chapters on Accius’ Oedipus, Seneca's Oedipus and Seneca's incomplete Phoenician Women, after which the book ends with a brief conclusion.

Early in the last century L. Legras adopted a similar programme regarding the Greek epic and tragic sources (Les légendes thébaines dans l’épopée et la tragédie grecques [1905]), and C. Robert, also concentrating on Greek material, produced an exhaustive study of a rather wider range of evidence (Oidipus. Geschichte eines poetischen Stoffs im griechischen Altertum [1915]). Amid a welter of later studies devoted to every aspect of the myth, literature and art surrounding Oedipus and his family, these two comprehensive works, especially Robert's, remained influential. Meanwhile, new material came to light, most notably fragments of a poem by Stesichorus usually called Thebais (the ‘Lille Stesichorus’, fr. 97 Finglass), a fragmentary hypothesis of Euripides’ Oedipus and further papyrus fragments attributable to that play. These all appeared well before L. Edmunds’s Oedipus (2006), a reader-friendly survey covering some of the same ground as the book under review (and much more besides). I. aims to distinguish herself from her many predecessors by concentrating on literary, above all dramatic, versions, and attending systematically to characters, motifs and plot elements. She carefully charts the first attested appearance of each of these as a basis for discussing what each author could have found in the earlier tradition as well as what he (or, in the solitary case of Corinna, she) invented – or rather, may have invented, since I. recognises that the first attestation of a detail provides no guarantee that it did not occur previously.

To find the sort of information I. thus places at the heart of her study, many readers will be accustomed to consult handbooks, such as T. Gantz's superb Early Greek Myth: a Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources (1993), or scholarly editions of individual works. Indeed, I. has profited greatly from the recent publication of large-scale commentaries on Stesichorus by M. Davies and P.J. Finglass (2014) and Sophocles’ Oedipus the King by P.J. Finglass (2018), among others. For Seneca's Oedipus, she relies more on K. Töchterle (1994) than on A. Boyle (2011). Such editions invariably provide rather more literary and other kinds of interpretation than I. aims for, as she focuses resolutely on the appearance (or not) of individual mythical details chiefly as evidence for the presence (or not) of ‘influence’. Nor is I. in the habit of pressing her evidence very hard. Thus, regarding the Stesichorean Queen's proposal that Eteocles and Polynices divide Oedipus’ inheritance by drawing lots (one lot to bestow kingship, the other property), I. simply records that, whereas Stesichorus has this detail and may have invented it, others do not (p. 37). Contrast the recent discussion by L. Swift, building on half a dozen predecessors, of the lot as a dominant image in Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes (‘Stesichorus on Stage’, in P.J. Finglass and A. Kelly, [edd.], Stesichorus in Context [2015], pp. 125–44, at 136–8). As Swift notes, we do not know how Aeschylus presented the division of the inheritance in the lost portions of his tetralogy. If he offered an actual lottery on stage, the Stesichorean intertext was even stronger than we can verify, but it is hardly less interesting if he found a literal lottery in his predecessor and turned it into a ‘driving metaphor’ in Seven against Thebes. Similarly, the possibility that the Stesichorean Queen's effort to avoid the fulfilment of Tiresias’ prophecy bears some relationship to the Sophoclean Jocasta's scepticism regarding oracles or Oedipus’ effort to avoid fulfilling the oracle Apollo gave him is not the kind of thing over which I. lingers, though a bare citation hints at the former (p. 36 n. 20).

Regarding the characterisation of Creon as envious in Euripides’ Oedipus (if fr. 551 may be taken to indicate this), I. notes that, while the Creon of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King is not in fact envious or ambitious, Oedipus accuses him of being such, and thus Euripides may have ‘relied on’ Sophocles in this extended sense (p. 132). Earlier (p. 122) I. suggests that Euripides’ negative portrayal of Creon may represent a purposeful ‘imitation by contrast’ of the figure who, when he re-enters late in Sophocles’ play, declines to mock Oedipus. Like many others, I. makes a similar observation about the characterisation of Eteocles in Euripides’ Phoenician Women (p. 138), but more, and more daring, interpretations of this kind would have been welcome.

The book's origins as a dissertation remain evident, and indeed I. cites the excellent Munich dissertation of C. Zimmermann, Der Antigone-Mythos in der antiken Literatur und Kunst (1993) as a precedent for her aims and methods. Unlike Zimmermann, however, I. does not equip her book with extended theoretical reflections on the concept of myth or concluding remarks on the social, political, religious and ethical dimensions of her subject. She requires only three pages (pp. 3–5) to adopt a conventional working definition of myth and a procedure for detecting and describing intertextual influence. She takes interpretations of Oedipus by modern psychologists and philosophers off the agenda, and her reception history stops with Seneca. Of course, the myth of Oedipus could provide and has provided material for countless books other than the one I. chose to write. Her study can be recommended as a convenient and generally reliable source for exactly what it sets out to deliver. Among sundry minor slips, perhaps the most consequential concerns the content of the archaic epic Oedipodea. Although I. is aware that scholars dispute the date, authorship, sources and reliability of the so-called Peisander-scholion (Σ Eur. Phoen. 1760), she writes without qualification in her summary of the Oedipodea (p. 24) that it ‘must’ have treated Laius’ abduction of Chrysippus, familiar later as an aition of pederasty. I. writes clearly and concisely. She has read widely in the relevant scholarship and engages with it appropriately. She is not overzealous for novelty, but she expresses opinions on controversial matters and supports them with good arguments. The chapter on Euripides’ Oedipus stands out. Here I. goes into depth and offers an appealing, if necessarily speculative, reconstruction of many aspects of this puzzling play, with informed commentary on all the fragments, not just the ones pertaining directly to the myth of Oedipus.