Aeschylus: Suppliant Women ed. by Anthony J. Bowen

Abstract

Reviewed by: Aeschylus: Suppliant Womened. by Anthony J. Bowen Marsh McCall Anthony J. Bowen (ed.). Aeschylus: Suppliant Women. Aris & Phillips Classical Texts. Oxford: Aris & Phillips, 2013. Pp. 374. $34.00 (pb.). ISBN 978-1-90834-334-5. The Aris & Phillips volumes on Greek tragedy have steadily become more and more authoritative. Bowen’s contribution, on a play of massive difficulty both in text and interpretation, is in the top echelon. His philology is tremendous: the text (in which Bowen prints eighteen of his own conjectures or emendations) and apparatus (fuller than A. H. Sommerstein’s Loeb [Cambridge, Mass., and London 2009] but less so than H. Friis Johansen and E. W. Whittle, Aeschylus: The Suppliants[Copenhagen 1980] or M. L. West’s Teubner [Stuttgart 1992]) everywhere displays Bowen’s rigor; the translation, designed—sometimes quite severely and entirely in prose—for textual accuracy, does not read as easily as Sommerstein’s (perhaps quite intentionally). The commentary (220 close pages) is, of course, not nearly as huge as that of Friis Johansen and Whittle, but for almost all serious students and scholars of Greek tragedy it is much nearer to the ideal level of thoroughness. Along with a great deal more in the forty-page introduction, Bowen argues tellingly against Sommerstein that Suppliant Women, not Aegyptii, is indeed [End Page 138]the opening play of the tetralogy. On the date, Bowen meticulously reviews the famous P. Oxy. 2256.3, which, when it was published in 1952, moved Suppliant Womenfrom as early as the 490s to probably the 460s, plausibly 463; Bowen finds the evidence of the papyrus inconclusive for a precise date. Equally meticulous searching for the play’s date through structure, contemporary events, language, and dramatic technique leads Bowen to the mild assertion that all the factors “give good reason to date the Danaid tetralogy not long before Oresteia”(21). The introduction goes on to offer extremely helpful and incisive sections on the play’s form, people, staging, costumes, and props. Another fine section tackles what can be guessed about the second and third plays, with such suggestive perceptions as “Whisper of marriage at the end of Supplicesis followed by sham marriage at the end of Aegyptii;for closure [in Danaides]there must be good marriage” (30). The only dissonant part of this masterful introduction arises in the sections on meter, which are densely written and scarcely accessible even to fairly advanced students. This is a real pity because in the commentary all the lyrics are introduced with clear metrical charts and supplementary explanations. More broadly, throughout the commentary each section and subsection of the play receives a lucid paragraph, or more, of dramatic and thematic introduction. Then virtually every verse is examined, above all for philological and linguistic explication. However, within the commentary Bowen begins almost all of his entries with a lemma from the translation. The commentary lemmata and the words of the translation should, of course, correspond exactly. For all of his carefulness, Bowen (or someone) has neglected to make this happen: just in the opening 425 verses, there are 16 instances in which the translation and the lemma are notprecisely the same. Then there are two larger concerns, the first about Bowen’s allegiance to the current orthodoxy that the playwright of Prometheus Boundwas not Aeschylus. Throughout the commentary, in all the instances when he gives play-by-play statistics for “elsewhere in Aeschylus,” he only extremely rarely includes PB. The authorship of PBis not, however, a settled matter, and there are many scholars who believe that it and its trilogy are magnificent creations of Aeschylus. Bowen’s Aeschylean statistics, always interesting and relevant, would be even more so with PBregularly included. Secondly, Bowen also accepts another current orthodoxy, that at the end of Suppliant WomenArgive soldiers join with the Danaids in the glorious final lyrics on marriage and thereby form a third choral group in the play, together with the Danaids and the Egyptian soldiers. In fact, Bowen favors the continuing use of three choruses in Aegyptiiand Danaides;in Aegyptii;indeed, there might well be a double use of one of the choruses: “The third chorus...