Homer

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Homer

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1BartGr.
Editado: Ago 26, 2012, 1:44 pm

I'm looking for secondary literature on the Iliad and Odyssey: literary criticism, historical background, the Homeric question, anything actually. Any suggestions?

I asked the same question at the learning ancient Greek group, but since this group is considerably larger, I'm hoping for more response.

2Nicole_VanK
Editado: Ago 26, 2012, 1:44 pm

The World of Odysseus by Finley springs to mind. Not very expert on that particular subject myself though.

Also take a look at : http://www.librarything.com/tag/Trojan+War

Also there's a dedicated group: http://www.librarything.com/groups/homerthetrojanwaran

3BartGr.
Ago 26, 2012, 1:50 pm

Thanks!

4spiphany
Ago 26, 2012, 2:55 pm

Homer is a HUGE topic in classical studies.

Perhaps you can say a bit more about what specific aspects of the Iliad and Odyssey you're interested in? What the context is?

Alfred B. Lord's Singer of Tales is of course classic regarding the Homeric question.
Simone Weil's War and the Iliad reflects upon Homer, warfare, and violence in the shadow of WWII.
Gregory Nagy's Best of the Achaeans is more. historic, looking at concepts of the hero in Greek society and epic poetry.
Eva Brann's Homeric Moments is aimed more at a non-specialist audience, intended to help readers (re)discover the pleasures of reading Homer.

There's lots more, these books are only some of the more major ones that I can think of right off hand.

My personal recommendation would be Irene de Jong's Narrators and Focalizers, which looks at the narrative structures of the Iliad -- however, I'm a literary scholar with a particular interest in narrative theory.

I've also been compiling a list of fictional works inspired by the Iliad and the Odyssey, if that's of any interest to you.

5BartGr.
Ago 26, 2012, 3:39 pm

You're right, of course, it is a huge subject. Together with my nephew I'm currently refreshing what's left of my ancient Greek using Beginning Greek with Homer by Frank Beetham. We're now in the middle of translating book V of the Odessey and although progress is slow, we're both enjoying ourselves tremendously. Furthermore, in the group Learning Ancient Greek (www.librarything.nl/groups/learningancientgreek) the idea is brewing of a group read/ translation of parts of the Iliad (well, group is maybe too big a word since there are only two of us at the moment). Hence my interest, which is broad. The works you suggested have made it all to the 'wanted' list. Thanks.

6papyri
Ago 26, 2012, 10:58 pm


If you have any interest in ancient (papyri) and Medieval/Byzantine Homeric manuscripts you might want to check out The Homer Multitext

The Homer Multitext is a long-term project emphasizing collaborative research and seeks to present the textual transmission of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey in a historical framework. Such a framework is needed to account for the full reality of a complex medium of oral performance that underwent many changes over a long period of time. These changes, as reflected in the many texts of Homer, need to be understood in their many different historical contexts. The Homer Multitext provides ways to view these contexts both synchronically and diachronically.

- Description from the The Homer Multitext site.

7ginnyday
Ago 29, 2012, 8:38 am

I think one of the best general introductions to the Iliad is Martin Mueller's The Iliad (2nd edition 2009).

8orsolina
Ago 30, 2012, 10:18 pm

Troy and Homer by Joachim Latacz covers the archaeological and philological backgrounds of the epics. It reads like a thriller--I highly recommend it!

Homeric Moments, mentioned in #4, is delightful.

9Thorwald_Franke
Nov 9, 2012, 6:40 pm

If you can read German I highly recommend "Tatort 'Troia' " by Frank Kolb:
http://www.librarything.com/work/10056787
He is heavily and convincingly critizising Joachim Latacz.

Barbara Patzek is also a good read in this respect.

10anthonywillard
Nov 9, 2012, 7:21 pm

If you want to go to a lot of depth, there is the Cambridge University Press The Iliad : A Commentary in six volumes by G.S. Kirk and others. There is also lots of exellent material in the introductions and notes of the many translations available, many with more or less full bibliographies. Also much good material on all aspects of Homer in The Oxford Classical Dictionary.

11BartGr.
Nov 10, 2012, 2:28 am

9 Tatort Troia, sounds like a german detective! thanks for the link.

10 Do you know if Kirk's commentary is mainly linguistic or does it cover other aspects as well?

12anthonywillard
Editado: Nov 10, 2012, 4:52 am

@ 11 The Cambridge commentary is pretty wide-ranging, but it strikes me as primarily philological and literary in its focus. For more background on iron-age Greece, you might want to look at historical treatments of Archaic Greece like Greece in the Making, 1200-479 BC by Robin Osborne. Or The World of Odysseus by Moses Finley. There has been a lot of interest in Archaic Greece in the last two or three decades and there is plenty of good material. There is also The Cambridge Companion to Homer and The Cambridge Companion to Archaic Greece. Both contain essays by a variety of experts on many aspects of the topics.

13shikari
Editado: Nov 10, 2012, 8:43 am

The two-volume commentaries published by MacMillan/St Martin's Press on the Iliad (Willcock, 1978/1982) and the Odyssey (Stanford 1947/1948) are good if you're approaching via the Greek text. I think they've been republished by Bristol Classical Texts or Duckworth. They're designed for school/university students, but they do concentrate on textual features. For an overview, you might look at the Cambridge Companion to Homer (ah, I see anthonywillard agrees) or better and more expensive in equal measure Brill's excellent New Companion to Homer.

14anthonywillard
Editado: Nov 10, 2012, 10:02 pm

I second Shikari on the Macmillan commentaries, at least the two volumes on the Odyssey. (I don't have the ones on the Iliad.) It may be possible to find them used. If you have been using Pharr as a textbook, the Macmillan commentary is similar to Pharr's commentarial notes, though on a slightly deeper level. For a beginner they will of course be much more practical (telling you what you most need to know) than the Cambridge Commentary, though not as full on background.

I would also not sneeze at the dated school texts (unless they're very dusty) that can sometimes be found at good used book sellers and library sales, or even reprint editions. They may be outdated on archeological background, but are immensely helpful to readers. They do, however, often excerpt the text instead of reproducing it in full, judging what parts may be most profitably covered in a school term. Macmillan gives you the whole megillah.

15anthonywillard
Nov 10, 2012, 9:59 pm

Shikari notes that the Brill Companion is costly. In fact it will cost you a bundle. Amazon has used copies ranging from about $200 to over $400. Maybe inter-library loan is available. I have to question whether its contents really add that much value to information available at a lower cost.

16shikari
Editado: Nov 10, 2012, 11:22 pm

To be fair to Brill, anthonywillard, they did release both the Homer companion and a number of their other companions in paperback last year. Still not cheap, but $49.50/€37.00 is much better than $346.00/€249.00. I didn't buy a copy myself (that's what academic libraries are for!) but I did buy a copy of Brill's Companion to Apollonius Rhodius that I've coveted for a while.

17shikari
Editado: Nov 10, 2012, 11:15 pm

On school texts, as anthonywillard has mentioned the subject, there are a host of different editions of individual books of the Iliad and Odyssey available from the first half of the twentieth century. Oxford University Press did some under the imprint of the Pitt Press. They're little pocket-sized hardbacks, ideal when you're commuting. Some editions have glossaries, which makes them ideal. For example, G. M. Edwards did an edition of Homer: Odyssey IX, which has a good little intro to Homeric Greek, a text, a commentary and vocabulary all in 142 pages (I see it's been republished in a larger paperback format by Bristol Classical Press). Odyssey 9 includes the cyclops episode, so not a bad one to try.
Another tool that's really useful is a Homeric dictionary. My favourite is Richard J. Cunliffe's A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect, better IMO than the more easily-found one by Autenrieth, though also commensurately larger physically. It's fortunately been reprinted by the University of Oklahoma Press as the original Blackie edition is hard to find.

18anthonywillard
Nov 11, 2012, 3:57 am

@ 16 This is not a question of fairness to Brill, $49.50 sounds like a reasonable price, but is not available on US Amazon. New editions run from $301.81 to $463.13. This is not Brill's price, but the price from Amazon's Marketplace sellers (secondary bookseller market), which is all that's available. Amazon is not selling these directly. The 2011 paperback is not available in the US. Now that you have alerted me to it I see it is available from UK Amazon marketplace sellers for £147.41 ($234.44) new and £50.00 ($79.52) used. Plus international shipping. They have one copy of each. I'm going to have to think about getting that used copy, unless someone else reading this beats me to it. (Which I would thank them for doing, actually. Save me from my compulsions.) Now to look at Amazon DE. . .

19anthonywillard
Editado: Nov 11, 2012, 4:05 am

I should also mention that IMO unlike companions to Homer, companions to Apollonius are far between and probably worth snapping up when found.

20shikari
Editado: Nov 11, 2012, 9:24 am

How strange! You can buy it direct from the publisher (http://www.brill.com/new-companion-homer-0) for $49.50/€37.00 (+ sales tax for European customers), but otherwise it is patchily available. I can't see it on any English language book supplier bar Amazon retailers at exploitative prices. Amazon.de supplies it at €40.99 (based on a retail price of €42.99) and the Dutch BOL (www.bol.com) sell it at a retail price of €43.99. It is a part of a new print-on-demand enterprise at Brill - could that be another reason for problems? Have they abandoned POD? But why would it still be in their catalogue? Or have they screwed up their electronic list for the English-speaking world? (I see the editors' names are wrong on the entry on Amazon.co.uk.) Yet the Apollonius volume is available on Amazon.co.uk.

21Thorwald_Franke
Nov 11, 2012, 1:01 pm

11

> Tatort Troia, sounds like a german detective! thanks for the link.

This is very true ... when it comes to the excavations in Troy in the last 20-30 years, we have to learn that a lot of politics influenced the whole interpretation. Turkey wanted to become a member of the European Union and thus wanted to show that it deserves to be part of Europe ... e.g. by a proper interpretation of the excavations at Troy. The German car producer Daimler funded the excavations and had similar interests, because of a lot of factories in Turkey.

The German excavator Manfred Korfmann did act according to these wishes ... well ... science probably has to be rewritten in some aspects, now.

Kolb's book gives a deep insight how academia works under political and economic influence.

22anthonywillard
Nov 11, 2012, 4:50 pm

@ 20 : Thanks for doing all that research. I will order it from Brill. I'm so habituated to Amazon I didn't even think of that.

23shikari
Nov 11, 2012, 11:26 pm

We all get so reliant on it, anthonywillard!

24groovykinda
Nov 12, 2012, 3:09 pm

There is a Near Fine Brill companion for Appollonius on alibris.com, for 59.84. Next one up is $220.

25BartGr.
Nov 13, 2012, 4:46 am

You guys are bad news for my wallet. Thanks nevertheless.