GREEK DRAMA AND PHILOSOPHY: The Philosophical Stage. Drama and Dialectic in Classical Athens. Pp. xiv + 269. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2021. Cased, £30, US$39.95. ISBN: 978-0-691-20518-2

Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2021. Because much writing in the fifth century was ‘pre-disciplinary’, i.e. ‘substantially open and engaged with one another’, in discussing ‘the questions of wisdom’ (p. 5) B. uses a synchronic approach to the material and avoids the speculation and doubt that accompanies diachronic methods of influence. [...]B. reads drama not as a source for the history of philosophy but rather as intellectual history (p. 10) that ‘makes a plurality of viewpoints available without hierarchy or conclusion’ (p. 12). The catalogue of Aeschylus’ Prometheus parallels Palamedes’ in that both, though full of knowledge about human culture and inventions, are caught in futile situations. [...]the rosy picture Prometheus paints of human progress is undermined by the words and events of the rest of the play.