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THE FRAGMENTS OF EURIPIDES’ ALEXANDROS

KA R AM A N O U ( I . ) Euripides, Alexandros. Introduction, Text and Commentary. (Texte und Kommentare 57.) Pp. xvi + 381, colour pls. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2017. Cased, £100, E109.95, US $126.99. ISBN: 978-3-11-053402-3. doi:10.1017/S0009840X18002457 K. has produced an essential resource for future work on Euripides’ fragmentary Alexandros, consisting of an introduction, a text of testimonia and fragments with English translation, a commentary and a brief appendix giving a text and translation of Ennius’ fragmentary Alexander. She makes some new suggestions at the level of detail, particularly supplements in the Strasbourg papyrus fragments, but most substantial proposals she has published elsewhere (e.g. the probable agonistic framework of the scene between Deiphobus and Hector, ZPE 178 [2011], 35–47, and her reconstruction of lines 4–6 of the hypothesis (T1), ZPE 202 [2017], 35–47). The work’s outstanding feature is its comprehensiveness; virtually all conceivable evidence for the play is assembled here, though it is not always easy to navigate. The reader who agrees with her statement that ‘the fragmentary state of the play requires that every possibility should be explored’ (p. 29)1 will find it invaluable; others may find it slightly overwhelming. K. has personally inspected the relevant manuscripts and papyri, and through the inclusion of some beautiful colour plates (also digitally accessible) she invites the reader to perform the same autopsy. Her meticulousness extends to present-day sources; her discussion of performance reception is enriched by her conversation with the director of a recent reconstruction and staging of the full trilogy, and she has an extraordinary command of the secondary literature. She provides extensive bibliographies for virtually every issue raised by the evidence for the play, and I expect that subsequent work will frequently include notes along the lines of ‘see bibliography in Karamanou 2017’. (Needless to say, there are no such ‘forwarding address’ footnotes in her work.) Her approach to reconstruction is equally inclusive in scope and admirably judicious in nature; she carefully works out lines of possibility for everything from individual letter supplements to plot reconstruction to staging, including even those possibilities that she considers most unlikely, and all with clear reminders of the inherent limits of such exercises. The 57-page introduction includes eight sections with subsections covering all the usual bases: the mythology as presented in non-tragic sources, other plays known to have treated the same topic, the characters, plot structure, staging (including broader performance questions like the distribution of parts), the trilogy, the text and reception. Much of this has been recently and well covered in the equivalent sections of L. Di Giuseppe’s 2012 monograph, Euripide: Alessandro, a volume that has a narrower purpose than K.’s work (focusing on the reconstruction of the play), but that overlaps substantially with it. K. gives a greater wealth of detail, but in the longer sections it is an embarrassment of riches, and without clear signposting it is easy to get lost in the density of the evidence provided. For example, K., after a summary of the most general features of the myth, begins her discussion of ‘The Legend’ with the relevant narrative from ps.-Apollodorus’ Bibliotheca and then works through the account, providing each