[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World now number around 100; this one, devoted to Aeschylus, takes its place alongside earlier volumes on Sophocles (2012, edited by K. Ormand) and Euripides (2017, edited by L. McClure). It is, as the publisher’s blurb says, the first comprehensive, original, multi-authored companion to the earliest of the three canonical tragedians, there being as yet no Brill Companion or other comparable volume. As such, it is to be welcomed, and the editors are to be congratulated for assembling an interesting and useful book.
Structurally, there are few surprises. An Introduction by P. Burian and Epilogue by J. Bromberg frame 39 chapters under four headings: Aeschylus in his Time, Aeschylus as Playwright, Aeschylus and Greek Society, and The Influence of Aeschylus. In comparison with the volumes on Sophocles and Euripides, Part I gives more attention to poetic predecessors, with chapters on “Aeschylus, Lyric and Epic” and “Tragedy before Aeschylus,” both by P. Finglass; and to the historical and political backgrounds against which Aeschylean tragedy emerged, with chapters on “Democracy’s Age of Bronze: Aeschylus’s Plays and Athenian History, 508/7–454 BCE” by R. W. Wallace and “Aeschylus in Sicily between Tyranny and Democracy” by M. Bell (to which Part III adds relevant chapters by E. Baragwanath and D. Rosenbloom).
At the other end of the book, there is an expansive treatment of reception, more like that in the Companion to Sophocles than in the Companion to Euripides. It begins with M. Griffith’s useful survey of “Critical Approaches to Aeschylus, from the Nineteenth Century to the Present,” organized chronologically under no fewer than twenty headings. Readers at all levels will find this a handy resource both for quick soundings and for the sophisticated insights of a seasoned scholar. Of his chapter on “The Reception of Aeschylus in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries,” C. W. Marshall notes that it would have looked very different had he written it just a decade ago, as theater history and early reception continue to be areas of explosive growth in the study of Greek tragedy. This is true not just, as Marshall writes, because “scholarly perceptions have shifted away from tragedy as an exclusively Athenian cultural product” (412), but also and simply because, as he well knows, source material both old and new has recently been getting much more of the sustained attention it deserves, in works like E. Csapo and P. Wilson’s magisterial Social and Economic History of the Theatre to 300 BC. Volume II: Theatre beyond Athens. Documents with Translation and Commentary (Cambridge, 2020), as well as a number of books and articles so large as to make listing even just the most important ones impractical in a short review. M. McCall’s chapter on “The Transmission of Aeschylus: The Miracle of Survival” is a concise and appealing treatment of a more traditional subject. There follow eight further chapters in Part IV on “Influence,” of which I especially enjoyed and benefited from D. H. Roberts on “Aeschylus and his Translators” and R. Mitchell-Boyask on “Teaching the Oresteia as a work for the Theatre.” The latter, along with “Applied Aeschylus,” by the working director (and scholar) P. Meineck, represents something of a novelty for this kind of volume, and both are heartily welcome. Meineck describes two programs run by Aquila Theatre at New York University, one aimed at “teens from refugee, asylee and other immigrant families” and built around Aeschylus’ Suppliants, the other aimed at the American veteran community and oriented around various texts including Agamemnon and Persians. “Applying” Aeschylus in such settings is meant “to create communities, validate experience, bring different people together to better understand one another, and offer different ways to present his work to new audiences” (531). Meineck closes with the observation that the idea of using Aeschylean tragedy in this way is as old as the comic dramatist Aristophanes, whose Frogs brings Aeschylus himself back to the land of the living to benefit his community.
Part II on “Aeschylus as Playwright” includes chapters on the six surviving plays of undisputed authenticity and Prometheus Bound. The three chapters on the Oresteia deserve special notice for their organization as well as their content. They consist of a chapter on the trilogy as a whole, a chapter on Eumenides, and a chapter on “Intertheatricality and Narrative Structure in the Electra Plays” (that is, of Sophocles and Euripides as well as Aeschylus), in that order. The last, by Ormand, in fact inaugurates the task of studying Aeschylean reception, since the author is less interested in tallying details shared or not shared by the three tragedians (as many have done before) than in considering “some passages in Euripides’ and Sophocles’ plays that appear to invoke directly (even if only to disavow) their Aeschylean antecedent” as a way of showing that “both Euripides and Sophocles made use of the Libation Bearers as a kind of originary text in subtle and nuanced ways” (146). P. Burian’s second contribution to the book, an ambitious chapter on “Eumenides: Justice, Gender, the Gods and the City,” synthesizes recent discussions of the important topics announced in its title, engages critically with some widely repeated but simplistic articulations of the play’s politics of sex and gender, and closes with a nuanced interpretation of the finale, “a particularly rich experience, drawing on the full resources of the theatre of Dionysus and a panoply of civic and religious signifiers,” prominently including its evocation of the Panathenaic procession celebrated annually by the Athenian spectators. The contribution on “Disorder, Resolution and Language: The Oresteia” by the late D. H. Porter has a unique status within the volume not only because it is here published for the first time posthumously, but because it is an acknowledged relic of a bygone era. The mid-twentieth century American (and British) New Criticism practiced with elegance and skill in Porter’s essay has been deemed outmoded in classical studies for well over 50 years, but many of its characteristic moves remain familiar because they are in fact still widely employed. Porter also draws on earlier scholarship that deserves to be remembered. I would hazard a guess that his essay will weather better than some of the older contributions to M. Lloyd’s edited collection on Aeschylus in the Oxford Readings in Classical Studies series (2007). Naturally, it needs to be read critically, like anything else, but its inclusion here serves more purposes than just hommage.
After the treatments of individual plays, we get chapters on fragments, satyr play, tetralogic form, staging, choruses, music, language and style, and myth. These are all expertly done and useful, and here it is worth noting that this Companion’s experts include a handful of scholars closer to the beginning than the end of their careers. À propos, I especially enjoyed chapters in this section by A. C. Duncan on “Visualising the Stage” (cleverly and helpfully theoretical as well as practical) and A. Park on “Intergenerational Myth-Making.” In Part III on “Aeschylus and Greek Society,” amid a wealth of insights on a wide range of topics, there are fine contributions by A. Shilo on “Ghosts, Demons and Gods: Supernatural Challenges” and S. Roy on “Aeschylus’ Persians and the ‘Just War’.”
Unfortunately, I cannot engage in detail with these and other chapters. Instead, and in closing, I turn to co-editor J. Bromberg’s “Epilogue.” (Here, incidentally, the reader will find brief summaries of all the chapters, on pp. 546–50.) Bromberg writes with a fine feel for the broad sweep of intellectual history, as evidenced also in his separate chapter on “Aeschylean Drama and Intellectual History” in Part I. He may somewhat overstate his brief that Aeschylus has been neglected, but he does a good job of conveying many of the ways in which this playwright is and is perceived to be so different from his two great successors. The argumentative thrust of the “Epilogue” is twofold. First, Bromberg maintains that in recent history, “the restructuring in the arrangement of the world, beginning with the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the first Gulf War, the 9/11 attacks, and the ongoing wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Ukraine have helped to enshrine Aeschylus’ plays as key texts for exploring pressing issues resulting from decades-long conflicts, political instability, and the massive movement of people across borders” (551). In the run-up to this passage, Bromberg more or less explicitly moves Aeschylus into a shrine vacated by Sophocles, whose influence is thought of as having been ascendant in the twentieth century.
Bromberg’s second and related point is about globalization, the topic of his 2021 book Global Classics (Routledge, reviewed in BMCR 2022.02.40). He begins with the observation that, as he somewhat quaintly puts it, “From the time when we sent out our first invitations (around the 2500th anniversary of the Battle of Marathon) to the time when we sent the final chapters to the publisher (on the eve of the 2500th anniversary of the Battle of Plataea), the global climate for reading, performing, and studying Greek Tragedy has rapidly evolved” (552). In a very brief sketch of this evolution in terms of “the interdependence and illusory stability of global markets, but also the unequal distribution of risk among the world’s richest and poorest people” (ibid.), he notes that in recent years, “ambitious populists and ethnonationalist politicians positioned themselves atop major world economies . . . and pursued agendas that have further victimized marginalized groups and cultural outsiders,” thereby contributing to “the popular view of globalization as a homogenizing force from the top down” (552–3). At the same time, oppositional movements have taken advantage of emerging technologies to build “global support networks from the bottom up” (553). The desire to recognize, encourage, and participate in “bottom up” rather than “top down” trends and strategies leads Bromberg to set an agenda for Aeschylean studies that emphasizes that they are, or should be, transnational, interdisciplinary, transhistorical, critical and cross-cultural, and ethical and responsible (554–5). While traces or beginnings of an agenda like this are visible in some of this Companion’s chapters, of which P. Meineck’s, described above, and S. Derbew’s on “Race in Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women and Persians” deserve special mention, I think it is fair to say that they are not particularly to the fore in what is in most respects a fairly typical example of a familiar and well-established genre. Nevertheless, what Bromberg describes does seem to be a direction, or set of directions, in which much of the academic discipline of Classics is moving. Certainly, in uniting the efforts of a talented and diverse group of scholars covering a wide range of essential topics, this book makes a worthy contribution to the foundation on which such ambitious practices will need to be built.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Aeschylus and His Place in History
Peter Burian
Part I Aeschylus in His Time 13
1 Democracy’s Age of Bronze: Aeschylus’s Plays and Athenian History, 508/7–454 bce
Robert W. Wallace
2 Aeschylus, Lyric and Epic
P. J. Finglass
3 Tragedy before Aeschylus
P. J. Finglass
4 Aeschylean Drama and Intellectual History
Jacques A. Bromberg
5 Aeschylus in Sicily between Tyranny and Democracy
Malcolm Bell, III
Part II Aeschylus as Playwright 75
6 Persians
A. F. Garvie
7 Seven against Thebes
Isabelle Torrance
8 Fear of Foreign Women in Aeschylus’s Suppliants
Rebecca Futo Kennedy
9 Disorder, Resolution and Language: The Oresteia
David H. Porter
10 Eumenides: Justice, Gender, the Gods and the City
Peter Burian
11 Intertheatricality and Narrative Structure in the Electra Plays
Kirk Ormand
12 Prometheus Bound: The Principle of Hope
I. A. Ruffell
13 Slices from Aeschylus’s Feast: The Fragmentary Works
Anthony Podlecki
14 Aeschylean Satyr Drama
Carl Shaw
15 The Tetralogy
Alan H. Sommerstein
16 Visualising the Stage
A. C. Duncan
17 The Choruses of Aeschylus
Eva Stehle
18 Music, Dance and Metre in Aeschylean Tragedy
Naomi Weiss
19 Aeschylus: Language and Style
R. B. Rutherford
20 The Long View in Aeschylus: Intergenerational Myth-Making through the “Other”
Arum Park
Part III Aeschylus and Greek Society 281
21 Aeschylus and Subversion of Ritual
Richard Seaford
22 Ghosts, Demons and Gods: Supernatural Challenges
Amit Shilo
23 Inscribing Justice in Aeschylean Drama
Sarah Nooter
24 Race in Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women and Persians
Sarah Derbew
25 Aeschylus’s Persians and the “Just War”
Sydnor Roy
26 Aeschylus and History
Emily Baragwanath
27 Aeschylus and Athenian Law
F. S. Naiden
28 Aeschylus’s Athens between Hegemony and Empire
David Rosenbloom
Part IV The Influence of Aeschylus 389
29 Critical Approaches to Aeschylus, from the Nineteenth Century to the Present
Mark Griffith
30 The Reception of Aeschylus in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries
C. W. Marshall
31 The Transmission of Aeschylus: The Miracle of Survival
Marsh McCall
32 The Bow of Ulysses: Aeschylus and his Translators
Deborah H. Roberts
33 Variations on a Theme: Prometheus
Theodore Ziolkowski
34 Myth, History and Revolution in the Nineteenth-Century Reception of the Oresteia
Adam Lecznar
35 Three Landmarks in the Reception of the Oresteia in Twentieth-Century Drama
Vayos Liapis
36 Oresteia on Stage: Koun, Stein, Hall and Mnouchkine
Hallie Rebecca Marshall
37 Transforming Aeschylus on the Modern Stage
Helene P. Foley
38 Applied Aeschylus
Peter Meineck
39 Teaching the Oresteia as a Work for the Theatre
Robin Mitchell-Boyask
Epilogue
Jacques A. Bromberg