Boyle's edition of Seneca's Medea is destined to be the English commentary for the foreseeable future, and deservedly so. Building on the expertise of Costa (1973), Hine (2000) and Németi (2003), B. offers an array of intriguing insights to this bold play. An ample introduction, new Latin text, facing translation and extensive commentary of almost three hundred pages make up the bulk of this volume.

The introduction contains information familiar to readers of B.'s previous commentaries (sections on ‘Seneca and Rome’ and ‘The Roman Theatre’ closely replicate the introduction of his Oedipus), with some new subdivisions pertinent to the Medea (for example, ‘Seneca on Anger’, ‘Medea in Rome’). B. stresses the political nature of Roman tragedy (xxix, xxxv) and highlights the way that Seneca's Medea conjures a framework for understanding violence as an essential element of both the origin of civilization and the existing social order (lii). This introduction repays close reading as B. touches upon many stimulating points, noting that each of Seneca's tragedies ‘even the two where infanticide is unrealized (Oedipus and Phoenissae), pivot around the murder of children’ (lxxxix), and that Medea's psychological insights not only apply to herself, but ‘she is also a profound reader of other minds’ (xcvii). Seneca's own literariness is mirrored in the character of Medea whose literary self-consciousness ‘is a defining constituent of this Medea's identity’ (cix). In reviewing the various tendrils of the Medea's reception, B. pauses to illustrate the influence of Seneca's version on the plays of Corneille, Glover and Grillparzer (cxxix–cxxxiv). A three-page catalogue of artistic works (for example, tragedies, opera libretti, short stories, sculptures) from 1900 to the present day graphically demonstrates that the myth of Medea has a global reach and that she has become a multivalent icon. Short sections on the metre and B.'s own hermeneutics of translation conclude the introduction.

As in his other commentaries, B. features an English translation with his text and keys his commentary to both the Latin and English. The translation is vibrant throughout, and fits the histrionic and hyperbolic heights of Medea's rhetoric as well as the more thoughtful and reserved Argonautic odes. B. strives to mimic Seneca's alliteration, tone and syntax when possible so Seneca's ‘maiusque mari Medea malum, / merces prima digna carina’ becomes ‘Medea, more monstrous than the sea, / Merited meed of the first ship’. This section concludes with a selective critical apparatus as well as a catalogue of the thirty plus differences from Zwierlein's OCT (primarily moments in which B. agrees with the manuscript tradition against more recent conjectures).

The meat of the work, however, is the commentary itself, which features strong grammatical and syntactical help, as well as the expected references to history, politics, loci communes, metre, staging and reception. Readers will find much to like here, depending on their own interests. Throughout the commentary, B. excels at pointing out what makes Seneca's version of the Medea myth original to him and how the subtle changes from Euripides' tragedy or Ovid's many Medeas (cf. Hinds 1993) serve his carefully delineated dramatic, poetic and philosophical aims. For example, his astute observations on the rôle of the Corinthian citizens who ‘enter to observe or to participate in the procession at the end of Act I’ and will return in the final act ‘in an attempt to destroy Medea’ (136), and Seneca's general tendency ‘to reverse Euripides’ focus on the close interaction between the Chorus and Medea' (153) reveal how Seneca alienates Medea from the other characters in the play. B. teases out information that pertains to the times in which Seneca lived, such as the Nurse's advice regarding dissimulation (165–6), Nero's interest in magic (297) and the ability of munus possibly to suggest ‘amphitheatrical shows’ (192). Notes on sententiae (130–1), fatum (243), the various metres of Medea's magical carmen (320), the rôle that stepmothers such as Livia and Agrippina the Younger played in political life (337) and the possible sacrificial connotations of hoc age (269) are particularly accomplished and convincing. B.'s interest in Seneca's dramatic poetry comes out frequently with careful notes on metrical issues, alliteration, intra- and intertextuality, imagery and close readings of various motifs of the play. For instance, Medea's magic ‘reflects the paradoxical nature of Medea, the mother who distributes death’ (298), while the final choral ode's ‘repetition and inversion of imagery from the Chorus’ opening song … underscore the dramatic transformation of Medea' (338).

At times, the commentary seems to want to do too much, and appeal to too many possible tastes or levels of expertise. For example on 139–40 one will find expansive reflections on intertextual matters and the possible religious ramifications of Seneca's language, but these notes bookend simple grammatical help about the independent use of the subjunctive, while the entry on the god Hymenaeus/Hymen leads to B.'s ruminations on invocations of Hymen in opera and the ‘Temple of Hymen’ of the ‘late eighteenth-century Scottish medical quack James Graham, the centerpiece of which (“the Celestial Bed”) was recently re-created in the Museum of London’. In spite of this penchant for detail, there are certain moments that could be expanded such as the reiteration of the Nurse's ‘messenger’ speech in the fourth act with Medea's subsequent incantation. While the audience certainly would experience a ‘theatrical shock’ (313), the poetics of this repetition are not explored in depth. But such quibbles are few and far between. This is a commentary that fulfils its purpose adeptly and comprehensively, and Senecan students and scholars will come back to it again and again in the decades to come.