K. has produced an essential resource for future work on Euripides’ fragmentary Alexandros, consisting of an introduction, a text of testimonia and fragments with English translation, a commentary and a brief appendix giving a text and translation of Ennius’ fragmentary Alexander. She makes some new suggestions at the level of detail, particularly supplements in the Strasbourg papyrus fragments, but most substantial proposals she has published elsewhere (e.g. the probable agonistic framework of the scene between Deiphobus and Hector, ZPE 178 [2011], 35–47, and her reconstruction of lines 4–6 of the hypothesis (T1), ZPE 202 [2017], 35–47). The work's outstanding feature is its comprehensiveness; virtually all conceivable evidence for the play is assembled here, though it is not always easy to navigate. The reader who agrees with her statement that ‘the fragmentary state of the play requires that every possibility should be explored’ (p. 29)Footnote ¹ will find it invaluable; others may find it slightly overwhelming.

K. has personally inspected the relevant manuscripts and papyri, and through the inclusion of some beautiful colour plates (also digitally accessible) she invites the reader to perform the same autopsy. Her meticulousness extends to present-day sources; her discussion of performance reception is enriched by her conversation with the director of a recent reconstruction and staging of the full trilogy, and she has an extraordinary command of the secondary literature. She provides extensive bibliographies for virtually every issue raised by the evidence for the play, and I expect that subsequent work will frequently include notes along the lines of ‘see bibliography in Karamanou 2017’. (Needless to say, there are no such ‘forwarding address’ footnotes in her work.) Her approach to reconstruction is equally inclusive in scope and admirably judicious in nature; she carefully works out lines of possibility for everything from individual letter supplements to plot reconstruction to staging, including even those possibilities that she considers most unlikely, and all with clear reminders of the inherent limits of such exercises.

The 57-page introduction includes eight sections with subsections covering all the usual bases: the mythology as presented in non-tragic sources, other plays known to have treated the same topic, the characters, plot structure, staging (including broader performance questions like the distribution of parts), the trilogy, the text and reception. Much of this has been recently and well covered in the equivalent sections of L. Di Giuseppe's 2012 monograph, Euripide: Alessandro, a volume that has a narrower purpose than K.’s work (focusing on the reconstruction of the play), but that overlaps substantially with it. K. gives a greater wealth of detail, but in the longer sections it is an embarrassment of riches, and without clear signposting it is easy to get lost in the density of the evidence provided. For example, K., after a summary of the most general features of the myth, begins her discussion of ‘The Legend’ with the relevant narrative from ps.-Apollodorus’ Bibliotheca and then works through the account, providing each element with a list of supporting and divergent primary sources as well as extensive parallels. This could be a very elegant approach to the task of laying out the network of mythical alternatives, and K. has adopted it more successfully for the plays presented in her 2006 edition of Danae and Dictys, but in the present volume the sheer number of parallels and variants leads to constant digressions that make the text difficult to follow. Its clarity is further impaired by the occasional inclusion of long lists of sources (complete with parenthetical references to the edition used for each ancient author) in the main text rather than the footnotes, and the unexplained shift from the focal thread of ps.-Apollodorus to brief discussions of the treatment of the story in Pindar fr. 52i(a), the Cypria and Nero's Troica. Nevertheless, K. leaves no stone unturned and rewards the persevering reader with rich discussions ranging from the story-pattern of exposed heroes to the variant spellings of Alexandros’ foster-father's name. Other sections of the introduction are more clearly laid out, and again contain much of value. In particular the treatment of the dramatis personae is lucid and useful, with each character given an index of references in the testimonia and fragments, and situated among comparable figures in other plays. Similarly, the section on plot structure outlines ‘sequences of action’ that are grounded in the fragments, with suggestive parallels from other plays.

The text varies little from that printed by R. Kannicht in TrGF 5.1 (2004). The facing translation is more literal than idiomatic. For example, K. renders F9 (56 Kannicht) ‘Frequently, one seized by ineloquence, even if one has spoken justly, is less effective than an eloquent speaker’. Compare the 2008 Loeb translation by C. Collard and M. Cropp: ‘Often a man disadvantaged by ineloquence loses out to an eloquent one even though his case is just’ and the 2004 Aris and Phillips translation by M. Cropp: ‘Often a man gripped by ineloquence, though he has spoken justly, gets less credit than an eloquent one’. The choice and ordering of testimonia is K.’s own, and more discussion of these decisions would have been useful. For example, Hyginus’ fabula 81 is included as T7, and K.’s commentary on this passage opens with a long discussion of the uncertain relationship between Hyginus and Euripides, but the section of ps.-Apollodorus that is discussed in the introduction is excluded (contrast Kannicht's decision in TrGF to give both as well as the scholiast on Andr. 293, grouped together as ivb, ‘mythographi’). The fragments are presented in the order of K.’s reconstruction of the plot (followed by a certain number incertae sedis and others quae probabiliter pertinent) and re-numbered, with clear cross-referencing to the numbering systems used by both Kannicht (TrGF) and F. Jouan/H. van Looy (Budé). The apparatus is as extensive as one would expect for a fragmentary work, giving the source and context for each fragment.

The commentary is characteristically thorough. It includes useful discussions of groups of fragments according to K.’s reconstruction of the plot, corresponding to the usual general discussions of scenes in commentaries on complete plays. The discussion of each passage begins with a description of the source (for testimonia) or the clues to its context (for fragments); these are very well executed. The notes are extensive, and there is no sign of the shorthand that often characterises commentaries; many of the entries read more like ‘shorter notes’ from a journal than the typical commentary entry. In some cases this is extremely helpful, but in others, particularly for the generic aphorisms preserved in anthologies, it can feel (to this reader) gratuitous, especially when reading through the whole commentary. Nevertheless, there is much of use here, and it will be a gold mine to anyone working on another text who follows up a casual reference to a specific passage in Alexandros.

K. has given us a valuable resource for the play, and in her preface gives a brief sketch of how the study of fragmentary plays can contribute to Euripidean scholarship. There is, however, no discussion of methodology, of how the study of fragmentary plays must differ from that of their luckier counterparts, and particularly how a commentary on such plays must differ. In the preface to her Brill commentary on the fragmentary Archelaos and Kresphontes, A. Harder claims ‘the commentary on the fragments is mainly philological, because obviously with fragments there is little else one can do’ (1985, p. ix). (In fact, this description does not do justice to her excellent commentary; Harder by no means limits herself to philological matters.) This is certainly not ‘obvious’ to K., and her work is richer because of it, but a reflection on what a commentary on fragments can do (and what its limits are) would be of great help to users of this book as well as to scholarship in general.