American Journal of Philology

In the past decade Hecuba has received ample attention in the literary scholarship on Euripides (Burnett, Mossman, Segal, Thalmann, and Zeitlin are among the major contributors, as well as Justina Gregory herself, and the textual basis of the play is now secure with the excellent critical edition of James Diggle (Oxford Classical Texts, vol. 1, 1984), while the new Loeb edition of Kovacs presents both some original textual proposals and a clear and reliable English translation (vol. 2, 1995). Gregory has now provided teachers and students with a fine textbook for study of the play in undergraduate and graduate Greek courses or for self-study in the case of a student who needs guidance on syntax, style, and other matters. Scholars of tragedy will also find it a welcome resource. Although the scale of both the introduction and the commentary is limited, the commentary still totals some 160 pages. The generous font size and the moderate length of the individual notes will make the commentary relatively unintimidating for inexperienced students.

After five pages on the original context (dating, elements of production) and six on "literary antecedents and Euripidean innovation," Gregory spends the largest part of the introduction (fourteen pages) on problems of interpretation. In opposition to interpretations that detect in the play a large-scale loss of moral bearings and in particular describe Hecuba as degraded by her experiences, rhetoric, and actions, Gregory argues that the Greek audience would have been able to "differentiate among the three acts of violence" (xxiv) and would not have felt the degree of alienation from and moral disapproval of Hecuba found in many modern critics. Among the problems treated in some detail are these: (1) the discrepant reports of what the ghost of Achilles demanded (Gregory sees the choice of Polyxena as victim as the product of human, political decision making); (2) the role of the winds (adverse winds arise only after the sacrifice of Polyxena and are not a precondition of it, and favorable winds follow the punishment of Polymestor, so that "the gods who disapproved of the Greeks' sacrificial offering seem to take a positive view of the Trojan queen's revenge" [xxxi]); and (3) Hecuba's metamorphosis into a dog and memorialization in a seafarer's landmark [End Page 129] (Gregory sees the dog as primarily an emblem of Hecuba's maternal impulse, and the mention of Cynossema as a link to contemporary realities, warning the Athenians that "the abuse of power is not without consequences" [xxxvi]). There is good justification for many of the points Gregory makes against readings overly influenced by modern concerns and values, but overall her reading strikes me as flattening somewhat the moral complexity of the drama. Much more characteristic of Euripides, in my view, is the shifting of sympathies and confusing of moral certainties. Compare, for instance, the case of Medea, where it is even clearer that in some sense the gods are on Medea's side, cooperating in her revenge, yet plainly by the end of the play even the sympathetic chorus has suffered a reversal of its identification with her, and a serious question arises as to what remains of Medea's humanity after her triumph.

The text is close to that of Diggle, with some debt to Kovacs. Gregory is in general a more conservative textual critic than either (not necessarily a bad thing in such an edition), and she returns to the reading of the manuscripts in passages like 224, 414-21 (order of lines), 805, 824, 885, 1162. But Gregory does accept a number of conjectures, and in several passages that Diggle enclosed in obeli she accepts an emendation in order to offer a readable text (again, a suitable decision for a textbook). She marks fewer lines as interpolations, although she also accepts a deletion (827) not even reported in the apparatus by Diggle or Kovacs. The commentary gives a great deal of syntactic help, with...