FRAGMENTS OF GREEK TRAGEDY: The Lost Plays of Greek Tragedy. Volume 1: Neglected Authors. Pp. xxx + 277. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Paper, £21.99 (Cased, £85). ISBN: 978-1-4725-6775-8 ( 978-1-4725-6776-5 hbk). Wright, (M.); The Lost Plays of Greek Tragedy. Volume 2: Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Pp. xii + 308. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Paper, £19.99, US$26.95 (Cased, £65, US$88). ISBN: 978-1-4742-7647-4 ( 978-1-4742-7646-7 hbk).

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Wright (M.) The Lost Plays of Greek Tragedy. Volume 1: Neglected Authors. Pp. xxx + 277. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Paper, £21.99 (Cased, £85). ISBN: 978-1-4725-6775-8 (978-1-4725-6776-5 hbk).

Wright (M.) The Lost Plays of Greek Tragedy. Volume 2: Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Pp. xii + 308. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Paper, £19.99, US$26.95 (Cased, £65, US$88). ISBN: 978-1-4742-7647-4 (978-1-4742-7646-7 hbk).

The central claim of this pair of volumes is that Classical tragedy was more diverse than is commonly accepted; or in its stronger formulation, that the tragic genre had no essential unity, but was a fundamentally heterogeneous affair. W. aims to highlight this diversity by providing a survey of fragmentary authors and plays accessible to an undergraduate or general reader. Although much remains speculative, and certain points of detail fail to convince, overall the work manages a useful balance between the introduction of a considerable body of largely discontinuous information and a lively picture of fragmentary tragedy of a kind that should encourage wider interest in the field.

W.’s books stand within a growing body of scholarship dedicated to fragmentary drama, spurred on in the case of tragedy by R. Kannicht, S. Radt and B. Snell's monumental Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta (TrGF). Specifically, these studies represent a contribution to making the field of lost tragedy more accessible to students and non-specialists, adding to work such as the Loeb Classical Library's editions of the fragmentary plays of the ‘triad’ of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Within this context, W.’s first volume on fragmentary playwrights, which includes the first English translation of a meaningful portion of TrGF vol. 1, in particular helps widen access to the field.

W. organises his material in a variety of ways, so that Agathon receives his own dedicated chapter, while more than 40 tragedians with no extant fragments fill up another. The largely chronological order is broken in one chapter that groups together playwrights with identifiable family connections. In spite of this varied presentation, the author remains the basic unit of analysis throughout. This has the effect that the lengthier unascribed fragments are left aside, whether from unknown authors (TrGF vol. 2) or by the triad but from unknown plays. The two valuable chapters...