Dionysalexandros

Reviewed by: Dionysalexandros: Essays on Aeschylus and his fellow tragedians in honour of Alexander F. Garvie Rory B. Egan Douglas Cairns and Vayos Liapis, eds. Dionysalexandros: Essays on Aeschylus and his fellow tragedians in honour of Alexander F. Garvie. Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales, 2006. Pp. 312 + xx. ISBN-13: 978-1-905125-13-5 Anyone familiar with Garvie's name and scholarly interests will appreciate the bona fide theatrical Greek of the title and also the editors' respectful silence about Cratinus' original referent. Cairns and Liapis, formerly Garvie's students, introduce this Festschrift with a biographical sketch that features a review of his four-decade career at Glasgow complemented by a list of publications to date. At the other end of the volume, is an Index Rerum (et nominum, I would add) and an Index Locorum (by Catherine Émond), each thorough and accurate. In between is a potpourri of seventeen contributions more than half of which are, fittingly, by authors known for editions, commentaries or translations of Aeschylus. These follow, as far as practicable, the chronological order of the works on which they focus. The first eight entries, accordingly, are on Aeschylus. Oliver Taplin leads off with a proposal that the Persai was produced at Delphi. He thus adds to what has become a spate, over the last decade or so, of attention to fifth-century performance of tragedy outside of Athens. Without harder evidence, Taplin's intriguing hypothesis might never gain consensus, but that is almost incidental, for he embeds the suggestion in a lively and informative essay on what he calls the Hellenic "celebration cuture" of the decade after the Persian Wars. A.J. Podlecki's Aίcχύλοc μεγαλοπωνότατοc , on the playwright's familiar penchant for compound adjectives, opens on a cue from Aristophanes' Frogs and ends with a call for further comparative and analytic work. As an ante, Podlecki presents an alphabetical inventory of almost two hundred pentasyllabic (or larger) compounds, and massages the same data statistically, play by play including, with due qualification, the PV. The various charts and lists, complemented by an up-to-date bibliography, in effect supply a kit for any scholar who would further pursue this feature of Aeschylean style and language. Martin West examines evidence for interplay of king and demos in six tragedies (excluding incerti poetae Prometheus). He demonstrates in the cases of Persae and of Supplices that fifth-century Athenian democratic institutions stand in contrast to Persian and Egyptian monarchic conventions. There being no king in Eumenides, West recognizes Athena in the corresponding role. He detects un-Aeschylean anti-democratic sentiments in the herald's exchange with Antigone at the end of Septem. Even accepting the consensus on the interpolation of the closing episode, this assessment gives pause. Are the harsh Theban powers that be (δήμου [End Page 71] πρόβουλοι, Καδμείων, τέλοc, Καδμείων προcτάται) really democratic decision makers, or are they oligarchic authorities (cf. Arist. Pol. 1299b)? Is the demos author, or addressee, of the injunction against the burial of Polyneices? Does that injunction, in any case, not match pronouncements of the royal, and undisputedly Aeschylean, Eteocles earlier in the play? Might the herald in any case be relaying anti-Theban rather than anti-democratic sentiments? Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones contributes nineteen notes on Agamemnon. Eighteen of them on textual matters advocate, with varying degrees of force or conviction, readings that differ from West's Teubner, and usually, from Page's OCT. There is one new suggestion (on v. 1299). The others put back into play readings or conjectures abandoned by recent editors. This collection might be read as supplement to the queries and suggestions in Lloyd-Jones's review of West's edition (Gnomon 65 [1993] 5–7). Collectively they provide a reminder, be it stimulating or sobering, of what a wobbly artifact the text of Agamemnon remains after a half a millennium of editorial labours. The sole non-textual note salvages a perceived pun on Clytemestra's name at 1100–1104 to which recent commentators have (quite pardonably, I think) been oblivious. Christopher Collard offers a tripartite examination of Tragic terminology for bodily dismemberment and mental disorder. His conclusion—that in Greek, unlike English, there is virtually no

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