This monumental work, containing 819 entries by 167 contributors on a wide variety of topics connected with Greek tragedy, from ‘Abae’ to ‘Zenodotus’, will provide a useful resource for anybody working on tragedy at whatever level. From start to finish, the project took four years (p. lvii); the editor deserves considerable respect for her expeditiousness, as well as deep gratitude for the high quality of the book.
The prefatory matter contains an alphabetical list of entries (which provides a useful overview of the contents), brief notes on contributors, a short preface and acknowledgements, an alphabetical list of extant tragedies, and a list of abbreviations. The encyclopedia entries take up the next 1,489 pages; the work concludes with over 130 pages of bibliography, and finally an index of over 100 pages. Yet full bibliographical details of the items cited under any individual lemma are given at the end of that entry, which seems to render a concluding bibliography unnecessary; its elimination might have allowed a reduction in the book's enormous price.
Perhaps the single most useful aspect of this book is its numerous entries on topics that do not immediately come to mind when one thinks of Greek tragedy. Probably no one has ever wished to look up ‘Eavesdropping’ in an encyclopedia devoted to this subject, but anyone who, during the search for something else, encounters S. Mills's excellent article on this subject, will not be disappointed. The same could be said for other fascinating topics, such as ‘Hair/baldness’ (L. Llewellyn-Jones), ‘Joy and Happiness’ (D. Konstan), ‘Metals’ (E. Griffiths), ‘Profit’ (L. Battezzato) and ‘Wandering (and Travel)’ (A. Tzanetou). Such entries enliven the work and ensure that browsing the volumes is both pleasurable and instructive; they may even suggest new topics of research for scholars, or dissertation subjects for students. Yet the book does not rely on serendipity alone to instruct the reader. Careful attention has been paid to integrating the entries by referring from one to the other where relevant. There are also numerous ‘dead’ lemmata which refer readers on to more substantial entries, sometimes with eyebrow-raising results (e.g. ‘Moral Responsibility: see Fate and Chance’, ‘Mother: see Matricide’).
Familiar warhorses receive helpful coverage too: for example, ‘Deus ex machina’ (B. Levett), ‘Justice/Injustice’ (E. Papadodima), ‘Meter and Rhythm’ (L. Battezzato), ‘Revenge’ (D. Cairns, a particularly fine piece). Other excellent survey articles include ‘Economic History of the Greek Theater’ (P. Wilson and E. Csapo), ‘Educational Approach to Greek Tragedy’ (M. Heath) and ‘Ancient Greek Theaters’ (by the late K. Bosher, a scholar who is grievously missed).
Some individual topics are teased apart under closely related headings. So we find, carefully distinguished, ‘Religion and Tragedy’ (E. Kearns), ‘Religion in Greek Tragedy’ (R. Garland), ‘Religious Beliefs and Tragedy’ (Wm. Blake Tyrrell), ‘Religious Festivals in Greek Tragedy’ (N. Dimistrova) and ‘Religious Practices in Greek Tragedy’ (L. Lanzillotta). Reception is extremely well documented with, for example, fully five pages on ‘Reception of Greek Tragedy in Catalan Literature’ (X. Riu et al.). The very existence of a separate article ‘Philological Approach to Greek Tragedy’ (V. Bers) is perhaps a sign of the times; but one wonders where the other approaches would be without this one.
As the editor notes (p. lvi), over a quarter of the entries (many of them very short) are on geographical locations. ‘Athens’ has a suitably detailed entry, as does ‘Corinth’ (both D. Rosenbloom); ‘Sparta’ probably merited a bit more than it receives. Many of the shorter entries could have been suppressed, however. Readers looking them up in this encyclopedia often will not receive more illumination than they would from a simple Google search, and as a result, these entries cannot really be justified when space is at a premium.
The article ‘Fragmentary and Lost Plays’ by C. Collard is a masterpiece (we would expect nothing less from him). Yet it is a pity that more was not made of the fragments overall. The completion of Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, the publication of Loeb volumes on the fragments of the ‘big three’ tragedians and the existence of several commentaries on the fragments of individual plays mean that these works are far more accessible now than even a decade ago. A synoptic work such as the present one might have made much of this welcome development. As it is, we get a substantial entry on each of the plays that has survived complete, but not on any of the fragmentary plays, even plays for which there are many fragments. This is an opportunity missed to cover these playwrights' entire œuvres, and to emphasise to readers that if we talk about (say) ‘Euripidean tragedy’ we need to take account of all the surviving evidence, not just the evidence which survives in full. Space for these discussions might have been provided by suppressing the lengthy plot summaries that begin the entries for all the individual plays; this kind of material can easily be found online for free.
The one place where the book disappoints is in the bibliographies that conclude each entry. These are vital elements of the work, since most people interested enough in a topic to look it up within an encyclopedia of this kind will appreciate guidance on where to look next. A few numbers might be illuminating here. The seven entries on the surviving plays of Sophocles contain a total of 177 items (counting multiple times any item that occurs in more than one bibliography; the number of entries in a given bibliography varies considerably, with Ajax meriting 62, Trachiniae only 13). Of these 177, five (3%) are in languages other than English. Out of 215 items cited for the seven plays of Aeschylus, plus the entry on the Oresteia, 18 (8%) are in languages other than English. The figures for Euripides are not quite as bad: 59 out of 505, or 12%. But only four Euripidean plays have a bibliography containing more than five foreign items, and the authors of three of these entries (Orestes, Phoenician Women and Rhesus, which contain more than half of the 59 foreign items found in the bibliographies across all the plays) are scholars from continental Europe (E. Medda, T. Papadopoulou and M. Fantuzzi respectively). Fully one-third of their bibliographies consists of non-English works; yet for many plays, that figure is close to zero, or in fact zero. For example, in the articles on the three plays of the Oresteia, as well as the entry on the Oresteia trilogy (all four of which, remarkably, were given to the same scholar), not a single non-English item is cited. Indeed, here even basic works in English do not make the grade: the commentaries on Agamemnon by Fraenkel, Denniston/Page and Raeburn/Thomas are all ignored, as is Garvie's Choephoroe. The entry ‘Suffering and Learning in the Oresteia’ (by a different scholar) similarly excludes non-English works, but there at least Fraenkel and Denniston/Page get a mention.
I have focused above on entries analysing individual dramas, but the depressingly Anglophone picture is not significantly different for other types of article. The presence of entries with a decent split between English and non-English works indicates that the monoglot tendencies of others are owed to the individual contributors, not to the editor or the publisher. This in turn reflects a more general, regrettable trend within recent Anglophone tragic scholarship, where major articles and even books on tragedy sometimes rely excessively on works on English. Yet scholars who do this are depriving themselves and their readers of a wealth of useful material, whether by the great European scholars of the past, or by their modern descendants. Readers consulting a substantial entry which fails to cite foreign works should therefore be on their guard.
Any project on this scale will have imperfections. This one has fewer than most; and they are comfortably outweighed by the virtues of the work. Putting together a project of this kind requires immense dedication on the part the editor and cooperation on the part of the contributors; the many people who will profit from these volumes should be grateful for the effort that has led to such an impressive achievement.
