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Oscar Mandel: Philoctetes and the Fall of Troy. Plays, Documents, Iconography, Interpretations . Pp. xiv + 256; 3 maps, 4 figures, 20 plates. Lincoln, USA: University of Nebraska Press, 1981. £11.40.

This unusual and somewhat ingenuous book sets out to survey the Philoctetes legend in classical literature and to re-assess Sophocles' Philoctetes in the light of this survey and of modern criticism, to recount the use of the stories from the Renaissance onwards, to establish an iconography, and to reprint with brief comment three short modern plays about Philoctetes, by Andre Gide, Mandel himself and the East German author, Heiner Miiller. M. openly admits not to have 'the unction of a normally ordained classical scholar', but declares himself ready to 'leap headlong into the Sophoclean hotspots of meaning'. He deserves applause for the zeal with which he has looked into the sources of the Philoctetes story in antiquity, a wide range of editors and critics of the Philoctetes, and books on Greek tragedy in general, which he lists in a bibliography and, for ancient texts, a catalogue of Loeb editions; and he relies particularly on L. A. Milani's book about Philoctetes and his iconography published in Florence in 1879. Experts on Sophocles will learn nothing from his discussion of the legend, which reveals ignorance of how to evaluate the ancient sources and is marred not merely by wrong references, but by arbitrary and unfounded extrapolation and surmise. He should have been content with Jebb's introduction. He sees Neoptolemus as the central figure in Sophocles' play, who, as the champion of individual conscience, goes a stage beyond Antigone's defiance of the State in refusing to treat Philoctetes as an object rather than a person. Philoctetes is immense, but learns nothing (a clue M. missed?), unlike Neoptolemus; and any imperfections in plot and action are subordinate to the importance of the philosophical exposition of the value of human identity. Sophocles, he claims, shows no more interest in divine intervention in human destiny than is formally required by his choice of plot hence the flatness of Heracles' final re-ordering of events. M. is more at home in the post-Renaissance world and has some good illustrations of artistic representations of the story. The three modern plays share a wordiness and lack of dramatic force which seem to dog the cerebral kind of author who in the twentieth century finds inspiration in ancient legend. The prose dialogue of his own short play is, to English ears at least, impossibly stilted and unreal. His translation of Muller, in a less modern but more direct yet poetic style of verse, reveals a Brechtian vignette in which Odysseus, as a good Communist, serves the public interest by means however dirty, a treatment not much favoured by the East German Communist party for ungilding the lily. But even here bathos creeps in, for example when Neoptolemus admits his deceit, yet begs Philoctetes to help save Troy and Philoctetes in his answering tirade bursts out with, 'Oh the bliss of being kicked. Another kick'.