Since 2009 M. has been working on editing the scholia to Euripides, and the book under review is a prelude to that edition. It will be an ambitious online open-access edition, comprising not only the ancient scholia on the tragedian, but also the largely neglected Byzantine annotations (a sample is available at euripidesscholia.org). M.’s work joins the relatively recent renaissance of interest in the scholia to Euripides and the other dramatic poets, and in ancient Greek scholarship more generally.

For this book M. has written five excellent studies that we read with excitement as well as profit: texts are brought into notice for the first time; manuscripts are examined not only in relation to the text that they contain, but holistically as documents of Byzantine culture; thorny issues of authorship and dating are dealt with authoritatively; textual decisions are explained in detail; and the latest scholarship and all digital tools available to the classicist are exploited to the full.

The first study begins with a brief account of previous editions of Euripidean scholia, from that by Arsenius of Monemvasia (1543) to that by Eduard Schwartz (1887–91) (M.’s review of J. Cavarzeran, Scholia in Euripidis Hippolytum. Edizione critica, introduzione, indici [2016] has now been published in Gnomon 90.3 [2018], 196–200): it emerges that neither the ancient nor the Byzantine scholarship on Euripides is adequately covered in the existing editions; hence M.’s own projected edition is fully justified. Then M. turns to Euripidean studies in antiquity and tries to clarify the ancient materials that fed into the surviving collection of the old scholia, and proceeds to look further ahead, to the fate of the old scholia in Byzantium and the new exegetical material first produced by the Byzantines. Who read Euripides in Byzantium, for what purpose and with what level of interest? M. elicits information on such questions by examining the codicological layout of each of the important Byzantine Euripidean manuscripts and by exploring the features of their annotation and script.

The second and third studies look more closely at the Byzantine scholia on Euripides. These scholia are connected with the teaching of Euripidean tragedies in the Byzantine schools. Provided that the main purpose for the teaching of pagan authors in Byzantium was the learning of the artificial, classicising form of Greek that the Byzantines ‘needed in order to acquire or maintain elite status in Byzantine society’ (p. 62), it is no surprise to find that these teachers’ scholia consist mainly of linguistic remarks rather than the interpretation of Euripides himself. The first section contains ‘grammatical’ material by anonymous teachers. M. distinguishes the different types thereof, richly documenting them with numerous examples and tracing their connections to material already taught in antiquity. Sections 2.2 and 2.3 treat two notable teachers, Ioannes Tzetzes and Maximus Planudes, and their Euripidean scholarship. Μ. collects the evidence of the two scholars’ engagement with Euripides more completely than his predecessors. He concludes that their work consisted of sporadic comments, ‘not continuous annotations on any one drama’. With regard to Planudes in particular, M. finds that the available evidence shows him ‘mainly engaged, as far as Hecuba and Orestes are concerned, in fairly elementary instruction’ (p. 104) and that several of the scholia claimed by A. Turyn to be Planudean are better taken as anonymous teachers’ scholia of the pre-Palaeologan era.

The third study offers some more pieces of anonymous Byzantine Euripidean scholarship. Its core concerns a collection of 32 grammatical notes on the Hecuba, for which the earliest witness is Sb (Laur. plut. 31.03) dated to 1287. M. gives the first critical edition of the collection with commentary in which he investigates the sources of each note and draws attention to the statements of each that are not paralleled elsewhere. He places the genesis of this set of notes in the context of the twelfth century. The study also presents and analyses another small group of ten lexicographical notes again on Hecuba, which M. discovered by chance in a filler page of gB (Barberinianus graecus 4).

The last two studies are palaeographical in nature and offer extremely detailed discussions of M (Marcianus graecus 471) and V (Vaticanus graecus 909), two very important Euripidean manuscripts for the scholia as well as the poetic text. The author advances convincing arguments for placing M in the eleventh century rather than the twelfth. With regard to V, he makes a fresh attempt to distinguish the different hands at work – both the original ones and the later, and he proposes a distribution of work between the two original hands. M. shows that notes added by the original hands and thought by earlier scholars to be Planudean are in fact products of the teaching tradition practised before the beginning of the Palaeologan revival of classical learning, whereas he argues that Planudean elements exist in the annotation of a later hand that was at work on the codex more than a generation after the original production; so the conclusion is reached that the original production of the codex should be dated to 1250–1280 rather than 1280–1300.

As is clear from this survey, the overall focus of the book is on Byzantine annotation, and although this material is largely concerned with grammar and will not improve our literary appreciation of Euripides, still it is important in more ways than one and certainly needs to be published according to modern philological standards: it will contribute to the study of later Greek and help with the documentation of poorly attested words (mostly words that could be described as vernacular; cf. e.g. ὑποταγᾶτος, p. 121); it will give us a picture of the reception of Euripides in Byzantium and will illustrate Byzantine educational practices, which form the basis for Greek studies in the Italian Renaissance.

I have just a few points: p. 4, M. is not precise and clear enough in his discussion of Schwartz's selectivity in relation to Schwartz's own editorial goal; p. 23, sch. Tro. 228, there is no reason to follow Schwartz in deleting αὐτό; p. 30, 6^th line from end, read ‘Sch. Or. 115’; p. 33, 1^st line, for ‘201’ read ‘211’; p. 41, sch. Or. 32, read ἐκοινώνησα and κεκοινώνηκε; p. 69, sch. Hec. 143, I find it more natural to correct the text to ἵνα μὴ συνεμπέσῃ τῷ ὁρμίζω, τῷ ἐλλιμενίζω; p. 72, sch. Hec. 168, I would translate τὴν περιουσίαν as ‘property’ rather than ‘survival’; p. 73, sch. Hec. 304, ἁπλῶς has not been translated; p. 76, sch. Hec. 31, adding ‘(= desert)’ after ‘Eremos’ will make the translation more intelligible; p. 83, sch. Hipp. 384, lines 2–3, for ‘and all the craftsmen’ read ‘and all the people wishing so’; p. 85, 8^th line from top, read θυμικούς; p. 85, 8^th line from top, I would obelise πλήν; p. 97, 10^th line from bottom of main text, read προηγησαμένη; p. 97, sch. Hec. 973, I would emend the text to τὸ μὴ ἐν μὲν τοῖς ἀορίστοις ὑποτακτικῷ (scil. συντάσσεται), ἐν δὲ τοῖς ἐνεστῶσιν προστακτικῷ – ὑποτακτικὸν and προστακτικόν are corruptions under the influence of the preceding τό; p. 99, 7^th line from bottom of main text, for ‘Hesych. α 8322 and 8323’ read ‘Hesych α 8522 and 8523’; p. 99, 6^th line from bottom of main text, for ‘ἀμομβρίαι and ἀμομβρία’ read ‘ἀνομβρίαι and ἀνομβρία’; p. 131, sch. Hec. 103, I would correct the text to δορυάλωτος δὲ <ὖ> ψιλὸν and revise the translation accordingly; p. 110, 5^th line from end of main text, for ‘item 14’ read ‘item 13’; p. 112, 7^th line, for ‘item 14’ read ‘item 13’; p. 140, sch. Hec. 481, read ὅτι; p. 141, I wonder if ἀντίκλισις (= LSJ ‘alternative inflexion’) in sch. Opp. Hal. 1.59 refers to phenomena of diektasis in contract verbs such as ἐλάουσιν/ἐλῶσιν/ἐλόωσιν; p. 203, sch. Or. 424, 10^th line, the addition of οὐκ, which is borrowed from Schwartz, is mistaken, if ἐσόϕισάς με is taken to mean ‘you made me wiser’.

The studies foreshadow an edition that will meet the highest standards of scholarship; we eagerly await the next instalment and, of course, the completion of the project in the not too distant future.