American Journal of Philology

This handsomely produced volume tips the scales as the heavyweight among Euripidean commentaries. It is a major philological achievement, which vastly enhances understanding of the play. Many of Mastronarde's previous publications can now be seen as prolegomena to a volume which has been over fifteen years in the making. "From the beginning," Mastronarde says in his preface, "it was my goal to produce a commentary on a scale that would allow consideration of a full spectrum of issues, from literary and dramaturgic to stylistic and textual." He set himself a challenging task on all counts. The textual problems of Phoenissae begin with the first two lines, which Haslam has shown to be spurious, and only compound thereafter. The editor must confront the innumerable small problems—doublets, ellipses, metrical anomalies, expanded glosses, irrelevant gnomes—that plague every tragic text, as well as substantial passages which adumbrate a tangled intertextual relationship with Aeschylus' and Sophocles' Theban plays, and which have come under strong suspicion as interpolations. Moreover the play, with or even without the contested passages, exhibits a dramatic structure which Mastronarde defends as "complex but well–organized," but which other scholars have condemned as clumsy or downright unintelligible.

In addition to introduction, text and commentary Mastronarde provides an appendix, complete with map, on "The Poetic Topography of Thebes"; a bibliography of works frequently cited; and a trio of indices (index locorum, subject index, Greek index). In his introduction he explicates the play's form (which he describes as "open" and associative rather than "closed" and self–contained) and unifying motifs (the quest for salvation. the conflict of private and public loyalties). He dates the tragedy to 411–409 and declines to associate it with any particular trilogy. Next he discusses the staging of the original production and the mythical background, including Laius' rape of Chrysippus and Euripides' lost Chrysippus, which some scholars have seen as a companion play to Phoenissae. In a brief but trenchant discussion of some general issues of interpolation he argues for a "booksellers' tradition" of written theatrical texts independent of the scripts used by actors. Finally he summarizes the history of the text, referring the reader to the more detailed treatments to be found in his 1982 study (in collaboration with J. M. Bremer) of the textual tradition of Phoenissae, and his 1988 Teubner edition of the play.

As Mastronarde explains (51), his text is essentially identical to that of the Teubner edition. He has corrected misprints, made a few minor alterations and streamlined the apparatus, but for the most part has retained his original choices while recording doubts and second thoughts in the commentary. His conservative tendencies stand out even more clearly now that Diggle's Oxford text of Phoenissae is available for comparison. With respect to the major passages [End Page 320] whose authenticity is in doubt, both editors agree in retaining the teichoskopia. But Mastronarde brackets only two lines of the testament of Eteocles, whereas Diggle deletes eighteen. Mastronarde keeps all but one line of the catalogue of shields, which Diggle brackets in its entirety. With some trifling exceptions Mastronarde retains all of the exodos up to the last thirty lines; Diggle, in contrast, excises the last hundred and eighty–four lines.

I am persuaded that the catalogue of shields is authentic. Mastronarde makes the telling point (457) that there is no redundancy in evoking the Seven first in the teichoskopia and then again in the messenger's speech, since the two descriptions occupy different registers, are viewed from different perspectives, and serve different functions. Equally telling is his observation (also 457) that Eteocles' extra–dramatic criticism of Aeschylus at 751–52 cannot be used as evidence against the authenticity of 1104–40, since the criticism is directed at the timing and placement of the catalogue of shields in Seven Against Thebes, not at the catalogue itself. I find it impossible to accept Mastronarde's version of the exodos, which no more reads like Euripides than Nahum Tate's reworking of...