F. has followed up his fine commentary on Sophocles' Electra with an impressively thorough and well-informed edition of Sophocles' Ajax. This is an authoritative and provocative piece of work in old-fashioned – perhaps slightly too old-fashioned – philology.

The introduction includes useful discussion under eight sections. F. begins with ‘Date’, and argues for a fairly middle-of-the-road position: Ajax, he concludes inconclusively, is probably close in date to Antigone, probably from the 440s, but a slightly earlier or later date cannot be ruled out. There is no discussion of whether dating might have implications for interpretation, and presumably the omission is deliberate; as I shall discuss further, F. is committed to a vision of the play which makes Periclean Athens more or less irrelevant to its trans-historical concerns.

Section 2, ‘Festival’, is only a paragraph long, and suggests that we do not know which festival was the occasion for the play's first performance. Section 3, ‘Production’, is far more extensive, and has useful comments on the staging of the play. This tragedy has some notorious difficulties of staging: most famously, the first half is located at the Greek encampment, with the skene representing Ajax's hut; at or before 815, the scene shifts to the ‘untrodden spot’ where Ajax goes to ‘hide his sword’, i.e. kill himself, far away from his family and fellow Greeks. Some scholars have argued that this shift must have been marked by a change of scenery (for instance, by stagehands dashing in to add panels to represent wilderness at line 814). F. argues firmly against this idea, on both practical and ‘dramatic’ grounds: Ajax's entry ought to follow immediately after the ‘frantic’ departure of his friends and wife, rather than being delayed by stage business. The other major scholarly position on the staging of this scene is Scullion's idea that the scene does not change at all. F. argues in detail against this position, as well as the variant (favoured by Heath / OKell) that, from the beginning, we are to imagine the skene representing both the entrance to the hut and the grove. His case is fairly compelling, hinging largely on considerations of dramatic and common sense. In the commentary on this scene, he also discusses the important issue of whether or not Ajax has washed off the blood of the slaughtered animals before entering to kill himself – and thus bloody himself with his own blood. F. suggests, against Scullion and Hendricks, that Ajax is clean at the start of the suicide scene; this suggests, although he does not actually say so, that his quest for cleansing from pollution is partially fulfilled at the time of his death, but the cleansing of the bloody, disfigured corpse must be sought again in a broader social context in the second half of the play.

The fourth section, ‘Myth’, argues that Sophocles' original contributions to the tradition include shifting Ajax's suicide from night-time to daytime, and his focus on the denial of burial to Ajax: in the Little Iliad, Agamemnon withholds cremation from the hero, and has him buried instead. These changes – although F. does not quite say so – arguably allow Sophocles to create a play which centres on ownership of Ajax's sturdy, powerful, quasi-sacred body. F. does not get to ‘Unity’ until his sixth section, and he provides a slightly different account of the ways in which the play's two halves (hinged around the suicide scene in the middle) fit together. He suggests that there are common ‘themes’ throughout the play, and cites the obvious ones of ‘friends and enemies’, ‘fathers and sons’ and ‘hunting and searching’. He also argues that the major narrative arc of the drama involves an ‘often ambivalent, even deprecatory’ portrayal of Ajax in the first half, which gives way to a gradual ‘rehabilitation’ of the hero in the second half, once he is dead.

The fifth section, ‘Heroism’, is the most polemical part of the introduction. F. begins by attacking the influential (Nietzschean) position of Knox, that the Sophoclean hero, characterised by firm will, isolation and so on, shows how humanity ‘achieves its true greatness’ through a ‘refusal to accept human limitations’. F. counters that this position depends on a muddle-headed slippage between two senses of the word ‘hero’, as both protagonist of the play, and person acclaimed and rightly admired for mighty deeds. He argues that Ajax is often not presented in positive terms, and that one should not import this ‘prejudicial terminology’, but rather, look in a more fragmentary way at the presentation of the character at each moment of the play. Similarly, he argues against the idea that Ajax is presented as the ‘last of the heroes’, a representative of an old, Homeric model of heroism which is in tension with the new democratic kind of hero, represented by Odysseus. Rather, he argues that there is nothing particularly Homeric about Ajax, and nothing particularly democratic about Odysseus. Finally, he argues against the idea that the play is engaged in any important way with the contemporary hero cult of Ajax at Athens, since there are, he suggests, no unambiguous references to such a cult, and only one possible allusion (Teucer's address to the corpse at 1171–5).

All this negative work leaves one wondering what, in F.'s view, the play can possibly be about. The point about Ajax's not-entirely-positive depiction, especially in the first half of the play, is well-taken, although I wish F. had been a little more willing to take a stand on what exactly the depiction of Ajax adds up to, and why it might matter. It is a little unsatisfactory to have all attempts at a coherent analysis knocked down, and nothing but Sophocles' ‘complex view of his protagonist’ put in their place. A very brief and again entirely negative section on ‘Politics’ reinforces the impression that, whatever it is about, it is not about contemporary politics; perceived references to the Athenian polis and its institutions are, he suggests, scholarly illusions. The adamant insistence that Greek tragedy is not engaged in any important or specific way with either the religious, political, social or civic life of its time is, to me, unconvincing, and indeed irritating.

F. ends the introduction with an account of his textual apparatus and textual choices, and here we come to one of the real strengths of his work. He has cleaned up the apparatus by not including various manuscripts whose testimony does not add substantially to our knowledge of the text, most notably the group labelled r by Lloyd-Jones / Wilson. This results in a much more readable and helpful apparatus, which I hope may be followed by future editions of Sophocles.

Finally, a brief overview of the extremely substantial and helpful notes on the play. F. provides an enormous wealth of information and parallel ancient passages on each section of the play, as well as awareness of relevant visual material such as vase painting. He shows a very impressive knowledge of a broad range of relevant scholarly literature, and he shows a keen dramatic and literary sensibility on issues of interpretation, in each scene and line. Particularly welcome is his attention to practical details of staging, and awareness of the difference that details of staging may make to the effect of a scene. His analyses of tone and characterisation are interesting, and he brings his sharp awareness of multiple points of view within a single text to bear on textual questions: for instance, he notes that when Ajax is described as resting from his killing, πόνου in line 61 gives a ‘finer irony’ than the more common manuscript reading, ϕόνου: ‘for a moment, Ajax is engaged in a hard night's work, not a killing spree’.

Readers may have doubts, as I do, about F.'s hedging over issues of interpretation, and his resolute refusal to put the play into any specific socio-political context. But there is no disputing the enormity of his achievement. This will be the definitive English edition of the Ajax for a long time to come.