This is a review of William Allan’s and Laura Swift’s commentary on Euripides’ Bacchae for the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics series. Bacchae is a Greek tragedy that dramatizes the return of the god Dionysus to his native Thebes in order to assert his divinity in the face of the skepticism of his maternal family, among whom is Pentheus, the current ruler of Thebes. The killing and dismemberment of Pentheus at the hands of Dionysus’s Maenad followers is a high point of ancient Greek drama, and Bacchae is notably rich in its dramatization of themes such as the role of religion in Greek civic life, the nature of the Greek gods, and the transformative (and potentially dangerous) power of charismatic religious movements.
This edition includes a 53 page introduction, about 40 pages of Greek text containing 1392 lines, over 200 pages of commentary, an extensive 30 page bibliography, a Subject Index, and a very short Greek Index. As an aid to construing the grammar and meaning of the Greek, the commentators are very good at anticipating where a reader with a good command of the basic fundamentals of the language will need some grammatical assistance or would benefit from a quick dictionary definition. Many of the most difficult phrases are translated at length in the notes, and the commentators also consistently parse and explain the more obscure verb forms that appear in the text. Overall, then, I would estimate that a reader with at least 3 or 4 years of Greek would be able to read Bacchae efficiently and enjoyably using this edition.
Beyond the grammatical and lexical help, this edition also has a number of other useful features. The commentators provide complete scansions for all the choral songs in the commentary and discuss meter and its implications frequently, making this edition one of the clearest and most accessible treatments of meter in Greek tragedy that I have come across. Another standout feature is the introduction’s treatment of the staging and performance context of Bacchae, which displays an overarching concern with helping the reader visualize the full sensory experience of the play, a priority that carries over into the commentary as well. The introduction also covers a number of other topics in lucid detail, among which are Euripides’ life and career, the themes and style of Bacchae, the figure of Dionysus in Greek religion, and the textual transmission of the play. Both the introduction and the notes are filled with cross-references to other Euripidean plays as well as to a wide array of other ancient Greek literary texts.
Given how comprehensive and dense this edition is, it is worth mentioning what it does not cover. The commentators note that the extensive reception of Bacchae in later drama and literature lies beyond the scope of this edition, but they do include substantial bibliography for readers interested in this topic. The commentators also do not include, particularly in the text of lines 1300 and following, any of the reconstructed lines derived from the Christus Patiens, although they do discuss this text and many other issues of textual criticism in the commentary.
A final point to note is that the commentators make many compelling interpretative arguments about the play throughout the notes and engage with a wide range of other scholarship on Bacchae and Euripides. This approach leaves the play very neatly packaged for a reader or scholar looking for a thorough overview of Bacchae, but for a teacher looking for an edition to use in a seminar with an eye towards discussion, it does not leave much space for open-ended exploration or disagreement.
Overall, I wish that this edition had existed when I started reading Greek tragedy many years ago. As an access point to Euripides’ Bacchae, its clarity and richness illuminates this enduring masterpiece of literature in a way that constitutes a significant achievement in the art of writing commentaries.
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