Nausicaa is not one of Sophocles’ better-known or better-attested works. Fewer than three iambic trimeters are preserved in the indirect tradition. Editions by Stefan Radt and Hugh Lloyd-Jones each deal with the drama in not much more than a page. It is thus a surprise to encounter an entire book devoted to the drama, one lasting, indeed, well over a hundred pages. The picture of an extensive papyrus fragment on the cover excites our hopes; alas, it turns out to contain text not from Sophocles’ play, but from the Nausicaa episode in Odyssey 6. So can a book on Nausicaa be justified?
The volume is divided into four sections. First, ‘From myth to drama: the sources’ (pp. 11–15) offers a brief overview of tragedies and comedies which derive from Odysseus’ encounter with the Phaeacians, as well as aspects of that story which made it suitable for dramatic treatment. Second, ‘The text’ (pp. 17–85) takes up more than half the book. Beginning with a discussion of the play’s different titles, it proceeds to the date of its première. Sophocles is said by Athenaeus to have acted as Nausicaa and displayed his skill in ball-throwing (test. 28 TrGF), which rightly led scholars to assign the play to the earlier part of his career; but the claim that its first performance took place ‘between 470 and 456’ (p. 20) cannot be sustained. The author swiftly admits that Sophocles’ debut cannot in fact be precisely dated to 470. As for 456, this is justified as follows (p. 21): ‘Sophocles’ retirement from acting was more likely due to the casting of professional actors in dramatic contests starting from around 456 BCE, which could be set as the terminus ante quem for Nausicaa.’ ‘More likely’, ‘around’, ‘could be’ – a firm date cannot be founded on such qualifiers. As for where the date of 456 (or ‘around 456’) actually comes from, a footnote merely states that ‘456 BCE was first set as the terminus ante quem by Hauser 1905, 32’, followed by a long list of scholars who have apparently followed him. Hauser’s argument (which cites an earlier work by Christ which Bononcini seems not to have consulted) was that the actors’ prize was instituted at the Dionysia in 456, and that playwrights consequently stopped acting in their own plays from that year onwards. More recent research, however, has dated the institution of the actors’ prize not to 456 but to 449.[1] Nor is there reason to posit that playwrights completely ceased participating as actors in their plays at that point; the professionalisation of acting was a process, not a discrete moment of change.
The second section continues with discussion of whether the play formed part of a connected trilogy or tetralogy, and whether it was a satyr-play, before turning to an edition of the fragments with translation and commentary. This is called a ‘critical edition’ (p. 28), and a list of manuscripts is duly given (p. 33—these should have been given their Pinakes numbers, however). But at one point, another scholar is thanked for having checked a couple of manuscripts online for a certain reading where published editions mislead (p. 35 n. 76). Since the author claims to have produced a critical edition, presumably he has done this himself. This section is extended by including several fragments only speculatively associated by modern scholars with Sophocles’ play. I wonder if this is wise. Certainly, when working with any of these fragments in future I would want to check what Bononcini has to say about them. But including them in a book entitled ‘Sophocles’ Nausicaa’, when secure grounds for associating them with this play are lacking, runs the risk of confusion.
The third section, ‘Vase paintings featuring Odysseus and Nausicaa’s meeting: two iconographic testimonies of Sophocles’ play?’ (pp. 87–94), could have been a footnote; nothing connects these two vases with Sophocles’ drama. Despite the title of the fourth, ‘A hypothesis for reconstructing the plot’ (pp. 95–100), the author wisely does not attempt to reconstruct the entire play; still, he goes too far in calling a prologue delivered by Athena ‘likely’ (p. 96), when this is merely one of many ways in which Sophocles might have opened his work. He adds ‘what could have followed is beyond speculation’, and then provides a paragraph of speculation; always with the scenarios, as Dante said.
An Appendix is devoted to ‘The other Odyssean plays by Sophocles’ (pp. 101–7). The book is closed by a bibliography (pp. 109–26). There are no indexes; readers need and deserve them.
Bononcini should be commended for his courage in tackling such an exceptionally unpromising topic of study. It is no criticism of him, but rather a recognition of the extreme paucity of the evidence, to say that the results of this research ought to have been presented as an article rather than as a book. Perhaps future volumes in this series could group together plays of this kind, when the fragments are so thin, and deal with them a little more briskly?
Notes
[1] E. Csapo and W. J. Slater, The Context of Ancient Drama (Ann Arbor, 1994), 222, 226–7.