Review: Hall, E. Adventures with Iphigenia in Tauris: A Cultural History of Euripides' Black Sea Tragedy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013

Edith Hall argues that Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris (IT) is ‘one of the most culturally influential of all ancient Greek texts’ (297). She devotes almost half the book to the play’s reception in antiquity, showing how ‘studies that focus primarily on the post-Renaissance reception of an individual Greek tragedy too often ignore the variant readings and intertexts that emanated from antiquity’ (3). She gives an imaginative account of why the story was popular in 4th-C. vase painting, looks at its impact on popular escape narratives, and offers a wide-ranging discussion of Greek mime in 2nd-C. A.D. Egypt. She follows Fritz Graf in discussing how ‘the myth which Euripides had popularized’ (136) accounted for cults of Artemis in various places, including the sanctuary of Diana Nemorensis near Aricia.