American Journal of Philology

This is a workmanlike study of Euripides' Andromache, with a good and up-to-date bibliography. Allan's monograph successfully takes on most of the (many) significant criticisms of the play, in particular those concerning its alleged disunity, and argues that the play is more interesting than it has been taken to be. Allan sets out to show that the play merits more attention than it has received, and he succeeds, at least with this reviewer; a classicist reviewer who has written on the play is, however, hardly a test case. Moreover, the assertion of interest is not a strong claim, and, given the constraints of academic writing, scholarly arguments for a quirky play like the Andromache are often less compelling than the literary work itself. [End Page 126]

Allan's thesis, that "every play represents a distinct thematic and dramatic complex which merits individual attention" (267), is undeniably true. He further asserts that the play is calculated to surprise and that the noticeable dissonances in it are purposeful as well. The book is divided into chapters on myth, structure, characterization, rhetoric, the spread of Attic tragedy, gender, the chorus, and the gods, in that order. Allan highlights Euripides' creative use of myth, drawing attention to the elevation of Andromache and the simultaneous way in which Euripides turns Neoptolemus, who was the center of epic treatments of the myth, into a corpse. There are connections between Allan's argument about the structure of the unexpected and Euripides' handling of myth. In part, Euripides builds the structure of surprise that Allan detects through his use of novel mythic variations.

The elements of flexibility and surprise that Allan emphasizes also appear in a different guise in his considerations of gender (chap. 6) and the gods (chap. 8). According to Allan, female characters are useful for exposing the tensions that emerge when heroic society encounters crisis (162), while he uses Euripides' treatment of the gods to contribute to the overall argument about the multiplicity of Euripidean tragedy.

Allan sounds a similar note in discussing characterization. Here he emphasizes dissonance, the contrast of traditional and invented story, and warns against expecting the depth of characterization typical of narrative from later centuries. This is a salutary reminder of the aesthetic conventions of tragedy too often overlooked by readers of the modern era.

Characterization not only grows out of structure, as Allan argues, but is developed by rhetoric. His goal in the chapter on rhetoric is "to reappraise the functions and importance of Euripidean rhetoric (defined more broadly than the mere use of forensic topoi) by placing it within the larger dramatic context of the plays, and by viewing them within the wider rhetorical context of fifth-century Athenian culture" (119). Allan's contention is that Euripidean tragedy shows the failure of persuasion because of the intervention of political power. He argues that Euripides uses the Sophistic arsenal for his own dramatic ends, never for its own sake; as he notes, rhetoric is closely related to characterization through the characters' self-presentation. As he also shows, in the Andromache and other plays of Euripides, the rhetoric cannot be separated from the fictional world of the play. Ultimately, according to Allan, rhetoric reveals the feature of adaptability, sharing it with his other analytic categories of structure, myth and characterization.

Allan asserts that there is a philosophical aspect to a plot based on surprise, but here I was disappointed and would have liked to hear more. The claim seems to boil down to the statement that the play is about the fragility of fortune (41), and this seems little more than a restatement of the commonplace moralizing tag line--that we can't know what will happen. What is the philosophical significance of the flexibility and surprise?

The chapters on the chorus and the gods underline Allan's point about flexibility in Euripides. His chapter on the chorus, he says, "aspires to indicate [End Page 127] how choral contributions function much more provocatively than is often appreciated, not...