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A COMMENTARY ON EURIPIDES’ TROADES

One would have thought that, after producing a text of the complete surviving works of Euripides (the monumental Loeb edition) and writing many articles and volumes on the textual editing of Euripides, K. at this point might be done with the subject, but, clearly, he is not. While I have some misgivings about the general thrust of parts of the introduction and wonder about the volume’s intended audience, this commentary on Euripides’ Troades is a welcome scholarly achievement. K. has not rested on his laurels as an editor. It has been 25 years since the Loeb volumes began appearing and 20 years since Volume 4, which included what was there called Trojan Women. K. has built on J. Diggle’s 1981 OCT, but has differed from it in what he observes are 100 places, with some of the departures already in the earlier Loeb (p. vi). In the first footnote, he lists the line numbers in the commentary where we will find discussions of his differences with Diggle. I would have found helpful a clear, schematic list of not just the changes from Diggle’s text but also where K. has changed his mind on the text of Troades. Indeed, I admire scholars who change their mind in public like this, and he also does so with some stage directions, such as correcting his Loeb stage direction of Hecuba getting up at line 143. The introduction covers what one would expect and does so generally quite well, which is not surprising as it in part reprises materials from several decades of K.’s published work. After dealing with the play’s production year and the history of attempts by modern scholars to link Troades to the destruction of Melos (more on that in a moment), K. explores staging, the Euripidean trilogy of 415 BCE, a broader interpretation of the play, the manuscript tradition and – very briefly – the reception of Troades. The comments on staging are quite sensible and straightforward. The section on the place of Troades within a trilogy (along with the lost Alexandros and Palamedes) is extremely useful for anyone working on Greek tragic drama. K., deploying the skills and judgement that have made him such a fine textual editor, carefully marshals the arguments for a connected trilogy, laying out in persuasive detail the evidence for the two lost plays and their thematic integrity with Troades. This approach makes his own focus on the major themes of Troades all the more compelling. The interpretative section loops back to his refutation of attempts to link Troades to the destruction of Melos, and while I largely agree with his criticisms of such work, I would find fault with their tone and resistance to finding any relation between this play and the Peloponnesian War. By this point a fair amount of space has already been devoted to the refutation of the Melos connection, as well as any thoughts of the Sicilian expedition, but then K. suddenly returns to the matter to close out the section (pp. 58–9), featuring some rather testy comments thrown in the direction of P. Burian. I do not find that these comments belong in a commentary, and the attention to the Melos question starts to seem a bit obsessive. Indeed, multiple pages of the commentary return to Melos, as well as an entire appendix (pp. 335–42). I, and most people working on Greek tragedy now, accept that the destruction of Melos occurred too soon before the production of Troades for it to have been Euripides’ primary concern and that the play is unlikely to have been mainly intended as an angry denunciation of Athenian military conduct. THE CLASSICAL REVIEW 32