This is a valuable study which draws deserved attention to the pervasiveness and, hence, importance of the many nameless characters in the extant Greek tragedies. As Y. points out, nameless characters appear in almost all the tragedies. Studies by Brandt, Capomacchia (not noted in Y.'s bibliography), Moreau and Karydas deal with nameless characters in specific plays or with specific types of nameless characters (e.g. nurse, slave). Given's entry on nameless characters will soon come out in the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Greek Tragedy.Footnote ¹ Y.'s is the first and only full-length study of the subject, which deals with almost every nameless character in the plays, excluding, for reasons she explains, only the choruses and all but one of the Messengers.

The study's inclusiveness enables, indeed invites, Y. to address the hitherto unasked questions of why and how nameless characters are used in the tragedies – not only in each tragedy, but in the genre. As Y. points out in her introduction, unlike the heroes whom the tragedians inherited from the mythic and historical tradition, the anonymous characters, outside the tradition, were invented and moulded by the playwrights themselves, without reference or obligations to precedents.

Y.'s thesis is that, in the absence of an omniscient or objective narrative voice, the anonymous characters served the function of demonstrating or facilitating the poet's interpretation of his heroes and their deeds. Even where anonymous characters crucially affect the action (e.g. the Nurse in Hippolytus), the humble birth of most of them and their concomitant self-effacement drew the audience's attention to the heroes they served. Their straightforward characterisation reduced the bias found in the statements of the heroes about one another. With respect to the how, Y. argues that the remarkable flexibility of the anonymous characters enabled each one to be used to suit the unique circumstances in which they appeared.

The book is organised to demonstrate both the overarching claim and the potentially endless ways in which it was implemented. Chapter 1, ‘Classes’, distinguishes between household or personal servants (e.g. Tutor, Nurse, Maid) and subordinates with specific occupations outside the household (e.g. Watchman, Shepherd, Sailor), and suggests key attributes and roles of each. Thus, Nurses, she maintains, suggest childlike qualities in the portrayal of the hero. The characteristics of the Heralds reflect those of the heroes who commissioned them. Priests are used to emphasise human limitations and ignorance. Children are used to intensify the sufferings of their parents and guardians. Each of these and other claims is supported with brief discussions of the role of the type of character in one or more plays.

Chapter 2, ‘Individuals’, focusses, as its name indicates, on the individual anonymous characters in each of the classes. The book's main chapter, it takes up half its pages and is divided into four sections: What they Say, What is Said to Them, What they Do and What they Are. This division is essentially a categorisation aimed at putting some order into the multitude of ways the anonymous characters are used. It is better suited than the more natural divisions by playwright and play or by class of anonymous character to Y.'s effort to give ‘some sense to the extraordinary variety of ways in which the tragedians subtly influence the audience's perception of the heroes’ (p. 157). But there are unavoidable trade-offs. One is a certain conceptual imprecision. How well can what characters say and what is said to them be separated from each other and from what they do and who they are? Another is fragmentation. Where there is more than one anonymous character in a play, different parts of the play may be discussed in different sections. Where the same class of characters appears in different plays, they too are discussed in different sections. For example, Hippolytus is discussed in the second, third and fourth sections, the Nurse in the first and fourth sections. Y. helps the reader navigate by including numbered sub-headings which designate the hero, type of anonymous character and play (e.g. ‘1.2 Etocles and his Scout [Septem]’).

Chapter 3, ‘Special Cases’, discusses three apparent exceptions to the preceding generalisations, the nameless Queen in Persians, who is a high ranking character with many lines, the named Cilissa in Libation Bearers and Loxias' Slave in Ion, who turns out to be Ion. The chapter's purpose, Y. says, is to explore the boundaries between anonymity and naming. It argues that all three characters are subtle variations of the previously observed patterns. Chapter 4, ‘Contrasts and Comparisons’, compares the tragedians' use of anonymous characters with their use in epic (Homer, Hesiod), in one play by Aristophanes and, very briefly, in the tragedies of Seneca, Corneille and Racine in order to demonstrate the distinctiveness of their use in fifth-century tragedies. The very short conclusion restates the book's thesis and, in a welcome move, briefly notes key differences in the treatment of the anonymous characters by the three classical tragedians.

The book is geared to scholars. The many Greek terms and quotations are not translated. The bibliography and multiple footnotes on every page attest to Y.'s familiarity with the relevant scholarship. For the sake of concision and coherence, she does not discuss the critical controversies surrounding the interpretation of the characters of most of the tragic heroes. Her own character readings clearly emerge from her careful and detailed analyses. But to engage fully and actively with her text, readers would have to be familiar with the other interpretations. They would also have to be very familiar with the plays as a whole.

In addition to being read through, the book lends itself to being consulted as a reference for information about anonymous characters in a particular play or about a type of anonymous character across plays. It is thus unfortunate that both the table of contents and the index are rather sparse. The contents table does not always list the secondary subheadings (The Watchman in Agamemnon, the Nurse and the Tutor in Alcestis under the subheading Prologizomenoi). The index does not include supposedly minor mentions of characters and plays that are outside their designated subheadings.

As with any work of interpretation, one can disagree with or have reservations about any number of points. For example, one may question, as some critics do, whether Phaedra in Euripides' Hippolytus is the noble innocent that Y. makes her out to be. One may wonder whether Y.'s contention that the characterisation of the unnamed Queen in the Persians, like that of the humbler anonymous characters in the tragedies, is largely dependent on her relation to the hero (in this case, her son) is not a bit forced. Similar questions may abound. None the less, the book offers a cogent, well-argued theory of the function of anonymous characters in the Greek tragedies. It is a stimulating and thought-provoking addition to the abundant scholarship on the classical Greek tragedies.