I. Approaches to Aeschylus

The reader of Aeschylus, surveying the ever-increasing volume of material written over the past twenty or thirty years, might well note with a mixture of surprise and dismay that the results of so much labour have led not to any hoped-for unanimity of scholarly opinion or even the establishment of a general consensus of interpretative approach, but instead to an increasingly diverse range of possible viewpoints and methods of investigation. Indeed, faced with the inherently plausible but wholly divergent arguments and conclusions of different commentators, he might find himself very much in sympathy with Cicero’s own complaint: ‘while I am reading, I am in full agreement; once I have put down the book,.... all that agreement evaporates’. If anything, however, the expansion in methods of approach is but the symptom of a growing awareness that the very nature of the plays, with all their ambiguities, deliberately leaves room for and in fact invites a wide range of emotional and intellectual response. At the same time study of the text itself has seen a shift away from the adventurous - some would say arrogant - emendation of earlier decades, to a more conservative attitude towards the received tradition, and this in turn has not been without its effect upon recent editions. To complement the shift of emphasis as regards text has come the application of similar rigour to interpretation of stage events: the insistence that these be founded upon what the Greek actually says rather than what the commentator imagines should happen. Much of the pioneering work on this has been carried out by Oliver Taplin, whose generally sound sense now provides sure footing where previously there was almost unrelieved quicksand.