Wright’s contribution to the Bloomsbury Ancient Comedy Companions series offers a clear and accessible introduction to Menander’s Samia. The author explicitly states that he is drawing on his own experience of teaching Menander to university students, and while they may be the main audience of this book, there is also plenty here to interest scholars.

The book progresses through Samia chronologically, with each chapter discussing one act, in order. Each act is subdivided into scenes for discussion, which is clearly indicated by an asterisk and accompanying summary of the action taking place, bracketed and italicised for convenience. Wright’s commentary is more thematic, indicated by headings when particular elements occur in the text. Each act provides discussion of a wide range of topics, including the choices of masks available for actors in ancient comedy, the reconstruction of Samia, changes in meter, the use of maxims in comedy, and broader questions of sexual morality.

The accessibility of Wright’s discussion is a real strength, especially with the more technical aspects such as meter or lacunae, where he is able to render the topic intelligible to a non-expert audience without making it simplistic. All quotations are in English, but Greek line numbers are provided, making this companion easy to use alongside other editions or translations. The notes and further reading suggestions provide a comprehensive but not overwhelming list of areas for students to explore further on their own, and overall, this is an excellent companion to set as secondary reading to give an overview of this specific play, Menander as a whole, and the core questions of scholarship on ancient comedy.

In terms of accessibility – a stated aim of the series – this companion definitely succeeds, but perhaps more importantly, Wright’s decision to focus on the audience’s experience of watching the play live, foregrounding Samia as a performance, addresses an issue many have encountered when introducing students to Menander: explaining why Menander is funny – or simply explaining that he is funny at all! Samia is a play rooted in misunderstandings and misapprehensions, with characters frequently at cross-purposes, and this is crucial to the humour of the play; by drawing attention to what the audience sees or knows in any given scene, Wright makes explicit the material which the reader, too, must understand to ‘get’ Samia. Although this does not guarantee that the reader will find it funny, it does at least improve the chances that they will. For example, Wright’s tabulation of the frequent entrances and exits in a scene in Act 2 where Parmenon, Nikeratos, and Demeas have 9 entrances or exits between them demonstrates both how the play was physically staged and how the frequent on- and off-stage movement could seem amusing to an audience – something which is not as obvious when reading a translation.

The discussion of other genres including oratory, Old Comedy, tragedy, and collections of maxims (often taken from Menander) and their relationship to Samia would be particularly useful for students learning to place an individual text within a wider literary context, without requiring extensive knowledge of the other genres. Wright complements this with a range of modern points of comparison, such as Midsomer Murders, which provides a way in to understanding Samia without treating it first and foremost as a deviation from Old Comedy and Aristophanes.

As with many ancient comedies, non-consensual sexual activity is a key plot device in Samia, which Wright contextualises on the basis of cultural difference between us and the ancient world. His more extensive discussion of gender’s role in the play in Act 4, ‘Attitudes to sexual morality’, explicitly draws attention to the ancient perspective versus the modern reader’s. However, this element of the play may render it less suitable for a school or sixth form audience – but the textual problems mean that Samia is unlikely to feature on a Cambridge OCR syllabus any time soon.