Liverpool (2025) h/b 548pp £95 (ISBN 9781800856288)
Seventy five years after Fraenkel’s monumental edition of Agamemnon, and getting on for seventy years since the still excellent Denniston-Page edition and commentary for OUP, Professor Hall has produced this full and weighty (in both senses) edition of a play with which she has long been involved—as is sufficiently attested by 38 citations in the 31pp Bibliography, and by the generous acknowledgements of help from other scholars. This review can touch on only a very limited number of aspects of the book, in the full consciousness that full-length notices will surely appear elsewhere. H. calls Agamemnon ‘a play about pain’, but might one not also reasonably suggest that it is a play about retribution and its inescapability?
The Introduction, at over 100pp, covers very wide ground, and concludes with a look into the play’s philosophical ‘heft’; the play is a ‘sustained enquiry into the nature and limitations of human knowledge’. The Argive constitution in Agamemnon brings to mind the old saying Homerum ex Homero, since Aeschylus naturally creates a constitutional background to suit his dramatic purposes. Of greater interest to this reviewer was the outstanding section on the Characters (pp.18-45); if a prospective producer were to be handed, say, the pages on The Watchman, his/her work would be done, so convincingly is he drawn by H: a section on ‘Sensory Theatre’ (pp.57-62) reminds us that Aeschylus was admired by the ancients for his command of the visual resources of theatre (as e.g. Taplin has shown). She goes on to point out how the luckless Cassandra sings (in part) in the strange and perhaps even now not fully explained dochmiac metre, which never appears before Greek tragedy and—it seems—only once after it. H. rightly emphasises Cassandra’s (relative) independence from the action; Clytemnestra’s brutal instruction to Cassandra (‘Get yourself inside, you, Cassandra’, l.1034, is as chilling now as it must have been on the stage). Whether or not Cassandra is to be seen as a ‘mythical forebear or aetiological precursor of the true priestess of Eumenides’ is open to debate; her depiction by Aeschylus is masterly. (As it happens, H. does not discuss Cassandra’s ‘afterlife’ as described some two hundred years later in Lycophon’s Alexandra, in which her ‘ravings’ have been brilliantly deciphered by Simon Hornblower.)
H. next approaches the ‘full complexity of ancient Greek religion’, as displayed in Agamemnon. Athenian theatregoers were not expecting a seminar on theology, and the Hymn to Zeus becomes less daunting if viewed as a reminder to audiences that Zeus, under any guise, was in charge, and responsible for the dire circumstances of the plays which they were watching (Lloyd-Jones in The Justice of Zeus, esp. pp. 90-91, is good on this). Apollo rivals Zeus for prominence in Agamemnon; other gods, including Artemis and Athena, play only intermittent parts in the trilogy. H. is excellent on how the hymn was used in the nineteenth century to define Aeschylus as a proto-Christian poet (Virgil too, of course) or as ‘head of a team of Olympians’: but, asks H., ‘How should we evaluate the justice dispensed by a top god who fails to avenge the slaughter of two blameless teenage girls?’
So far, so good: but it is impossible to ignore one startling—but unexplained—feature (or rather, non-feature) of this edition: while the text is printed in Greek, Greek is almost totally absent from the Introduction and Commentary, with the occasional exception of individual Greek words transcribed into a modern font. Of course, profuse references are given: but how many of us, reading, say ‘cf. Bacchylides, fr.11, 1-2’ will actually look it up? The absence of quotations from (e.g.) The Hymn to Zeus, or Clytemnestra’s remarkable speech which begins ‘The sea there is…’ (learnt by heart by your reviewer as a schoolboy) leaves the commentary, though well-stocked, looking rather bloodless.
The absence becomes serious when the actual text is at issue: the text that we have is notoriously corrupt and incomplete and in dire need of correction by emendation in one way or another. D-P obelise some 25 passages, and discuss them in their commentary: H. obelises only 6 passages (with an apparatus criticus that is short of, especially, modern proposals), and thanks to the ‘self-denying ordinance’ about Greek, is compelled to write, e.g. at l.1024, ‘the translation reflects the more sensible proposed emendations’—of which more detail would be welcome, but cannot be given, while at l.984 H. is understandably reduced to writing that the text is irremediably corrupt: in such cases we are offered a translation that, we may reasonably hope, conveys the underlying sense. This is the more striking because of the generosity of H.’s commentary: at random, the note on the Beacon at l.33 extends to almost two pages, and Purple at l.909 takes up another page (this is not to criticise but points up how at all points the absence of Greek is inevitably manifest). As to why there is no Greek, one can only speculate, since no explanation is offered: is a Greekless readership envisaged by the publisher? Of course, the riches of the Commentary stand out in sharper focus against the all-too visible absence elsewhere.
Immense changes in classical studies have taken place since Fraenkel’s edition of the play in 1950: one obvious instance is the difference between H.’s relatively slender apparatus criticus and the generous one of Page’s OCT (1972); questions of textual transmission play a much smaller role than once they did. This is very visible in H.’s text and commentary on disputed passages: to give only two examples, an excellent suggestion by Diggle at l.103 in OCT’s app. crit. is ignored by H., while at l.412 H.’s translation is her version of the ‘less implausible emendations of an irredeemably corrupt line’—to which of course we are not given access; and it is noteworthy—as mentioned—that, whereas Denniston-Page obelise over 20 passages, H. limits herself to six (of course, there is overlap). One may speculate that H. has taken to heart the view frankly expressed by Dodds that we now have texts which are adequate for most purposes (Martin West disagreed); at all events, H. has not sought to add to the voluminous conjectures that have been made to Aeschylus’s texts as they have come down to us—all too often in a decrepit state.
The translation is not one to make claims for itself (for me, the only jarring note was ‘textiles’ for heimatôn in Clytemnestra’s ‘The sea there is…’ speech); but without Greek, accuracy must have seemed, rightly, to be more important than elegance.
There is a long, clear and more than usually detailed Metrical Appendix—see especially p.487 on the amoibaion between the chorus and Clytemnestra. Production values of what must have been a difficult text are excellent—I noted only one misprint, ironically of the word Aeschylus.
Finally, it will be asked ‘Is this book a worthy successor to Fraenkel?’ The answer surely will lie in the interests of the reader.
Colin Leach