Elucidating The Greek Tragedies

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31659, 20 April 1968, Page 4

Elucidating The Greek Tragedies

Tragica: Elucidations of Passages in Greek Tragedy. By H. D. Broadhead. University of Canterbury Publications. 179 pp.

Considering their significance as the oldest surviving European drama, as well as their unassailable and somewhat enigmatic sophistication as art-forms, the Greek tragedies have not this century received their due amount of textual criticism. Aeschylus has suffered especially: only one play, the “Agamemnon,” has an adequate English edition, and some, including the “Prometheus,” are not even available separately. This cannot be because no work has been done on the tragedies: an examination of the contents of the large number of journals that are not stocked by our libraries reveals that there exists somewhere a large amount of relevant commentary. What is needed is for scholars to undertake the Herculean labour of examining all this materhl, I assessing its worth, and organising it into editions. If the book under review does not aspire to the heights of providing a complete commentary on any one play, it must at least be granted the merit of being an invaluable aid to anyone preparing an edition. Apart from this. Its usefulness is rather limited. Every surviving Greek tragedy gets some mention, but in most only three or four passages are discussed. The handling of 120 passages from the whole tragic corpus is not sufficient to make this book important as a work of reference, although it is laid out in this form. This Is unfortunate, because the quality of the comment is very high. Professor Broadhead works through the standard texts with an impartial I

sobriety, mercilessly revealing a large number of inadequacies in what have been hitherto regarded as wholly respectable commentaries. The Loeb series, the undergraduate’s Bible, comes out of this examination in a very unfavourable light. It is time someone acknowledged our debt to the patronage of the T. B. L. Websters in fostering the study of the classics in New Zealand: these people have provided a very necessary link with that Mecca of classics, England. The Websters were no doubt instrumental in the London Institute of Classical Studies’s grant towards the cost of

printing this book, and their critical assistance is mentioned in Professor Broadhead’s Preface. The combined efforts of these scholars make the publication of this book monumental to the advance of the classics in New Zealand. The only major criticism that can be levelled against “Tragica” is against its layout. One should not have to consult Italie’s concordance to find where Professor Broadhead is likely to discuss “Kompos”—this information should be provided in a selective Greek index at the back of the book, an inadequacy which, it may be hoped, will be remedied in future editions.