Marco Fantuzzi’s edition of Rhesus is a most welcome addition to the Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries series. It is an impressive work of a high scholarly standard, which crowns Fantuzzi’s long-standing interest in the play. The third book on Rhesus to be published in less than ten years after Vayos Liapis’ A Commentary on the Rhesus Attributed to Euripides (Oxford 2012) and Almut Fries’ Pseudo-Euripides, Rhesus (Berlin and Boston 2014), Fantuzzi’s edition substantially enriches the growing stream of critical work devoted to the play.
The book opens with an ample introduction (1–79), a large part of which deals with the much-disputed issues of Rhesus’ authorship and chronology. The play, transmitted as part of Euripides’ corpus, has long been suspected, and is nowadays widely thought, to be pseudo-Euripidean; according to Fantuzzi, it is possibly the product of a pseudonymous tragedian, or, rather, ‘a text composed by one or more actors or producers from the fourth century’, responsible for an extensive ‘reworking of the original Euripidean play with the same title’ (23). Especially through sections 3–6, Fantuzzi takes readers on a convincing tour de force of the reasons why a date in the fourth century, in keeping with recent scholarship, should be viewed as the likeliest one. While the evidence adduced by Fantuzzi does not amount to cogent proof of his proposed dating of Rhesus to the 330s (with the death of Philip II in 336 cautiously proposed as a plausible terminus post quem, 39–41), his arguments are certainly enough to at least tilt the balance of probability in favour of such a proposal. Fantuzzi’s textual approach is also expounded in the introduction, where his critical text is said to follow that of James Diggle ‘very closely’ (79). Anumber of his deviations from Diggle’s OCT constitute convincing instances of a return to the paradosis, each in turn lucidly argued for in the commentary: for example, at 518 Fantuzzi rightly defends the unanimously attested reading καταυλίσθητε (implying that Hector’s order to ‘encamp’ is addressed to Rhesus and his troops) in place of Kirchhoff’s singular imperative καταυλίσθητι (recently also favoured by Liapis and Fries); at 675 the fourfold anaphora of βάλε, preserved by most manuscripts, is retained (and reasonably so, especially in view of the similar sequence at Ar. Ach. 281–82 and of the possible allusive link between the two passages); at 875 Fantuzzi refrains from suspecting corruption in the line’s second hemistich, persuasively explaining away its interpretative difficulties in the note ad loc. (Further notable choices in line with the paradosis are made, for example, at 54 and 615.) As for Fantuzzi’s own interventions, in two cases he provides the text with a different, either more dramatically effective (687) or syntactically perspicuous (899), punctuation. However, his major contribution to the text will be found in the often novel interpretations of it, which are thoroughly expounded in the commentary (for example, 251b–52).
Just short of five hundred pages, the commentary is as ample as it is wide-ranging, and these two aspects are the book’s greatest achievement. Fantuzzi’s approach is truly ‘holistic’ (as per his description in the foreword, vii), in that it scrutinizes the play from a conspicuously rich variety of perspectives. The notes evenly address matters of literary analysis, interpretation, textual criticism and dramaturgy, while also analysing at length aspects of historical and material-cultural relevance, with a recurrent focus on the play’s military dimension. Fantuzzi’s mastery of language and of the Greek literary tradition will enable readers to appreciate the play’s text to its subtlest nuances and dramatic implications. (For select examples of insightful close readings of the text, see commentary on 8, 184, 438–42, 562–64.) Just as conspicuous is Fantuzzi’s practice, consistent throughout the commentary, of providing sets of literary parallels, at times remarkably ample (for example, 758–62), meant to elucidate a relevant feature or theme in the text, or to support a textual choice. Also noteworthy is a close attention to the workings of textual transmission, with meticulous discussions also of variant readings, or conjectural emendations, that are justifiably discarded (for example, 91–92, 115). More generally, Fantuzzi successfully manages to place Rhesus in ‘dialogue’ with the literary tradition, thus allowing the play’s peculiarities and unconventional features (be they on the level of style, stage action or other) clearly to emerge; particularly fruitful is the discussion of the complex intertextual relationship between Rhesus and its epic model, Iliad 10 (see, for instance, Fantuzzi’s perceptive remarks concerning lines 7–10 on the chorus’ opening speech and its relevance for the ‘allusive or emulative intentions of the author’ of Rhesus). An extensive bibliography (627–89), followed by a general index (690–707) and an ‘Index of Greek Words Discussed’ (708–11), rounds off the volume. The book is very well-produced: misprints and slips are rare and generally of a minor nature.
In sum, Fantuzzi’s vast and excellent contribution to our understanding of Rhesus, and of its continuity with, and divergence from, the tragic tradition, positions his edition as a critical tool that both scholars and students with an interest in ancient drama will find it hard to dispense with.
