This three volume commentary also includes an introduction discussing previous research on the Odyssey, its relation to the Iliad, the epic dialect, and the transmission of the text.

This book studies the social and ethical formation of youthful figures in Homer, Sophocles, and Euripides. Every fictional character comes with a past attached, a presumed personal history that is both implicit and explicit; for the youthful heroes and heroines of epic and tragedy, early education figures significantly in that past. Cheiron's Way takes as its point of departure the words of Homer's Phoenix to Achilles, who claims, "I made you the man you are" as he pleads with his former pupil to let go of his anger. The book begins by exploring topics relevant to heroic and tragic education: age classes, rites of passage, verbal modes of instruction, social conditioning, mentoring, peer role models, and the controversial balance between nature and nurture. It introduces the first teacher in the Greek tradition, Cheiron the centaur, who founded a school for young heroes in his Thessalian cave and instructed Achilles, Jason, and others with mixed success. Next it turns to the Iliadic Achilles, who achieves maturity by way of successive crises-a crisis of disillusionment with the assumptions that shaped his heroic education, followed by a crisis of empathy for his adversary-and who becomes an influential prototype for tragedy. Examination of the Odyssey suggests that while Odysseus received a normative heroic upbringing and Nausicaa internalizes social expectations for young women, Telemachus is more of an outlier. In tragic representations of education Sophocles' Ajax and Neoptolemus replicate the Achillean pattern only partially and unsuccessfully, as does Euripides' Hippolytus; only Achilles and Iphigenia in Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis achieve an emotional maturity commensurate with the Iliadic Achilles'. Yet all these texts confirm, as elegantly argued in this book, the perennial lure, despite uncertain results, of the educational enterprise for communities, students, and teachers.

For over 2500 years many of the most learned scholars of the Greek language have concerned themselves with the topic of etymology. The most productive source of difficult, even inexplicable, words was Homer’s 28,000 verses of epic poetry. Steve Reece proposes an approach to elucidating the meanings of some of these difficult words that finds its inspiration primarily in Milman Parry’s oral-formulaic theory. He proposes that during the long period of oral transmission acoustic uncertainties, especially regarding word boundaries, were continually occurring: a bard uttered one collocation of words, but his audience thought it heard another. The consequent resegmentation of words and phrases is the probable cause of some of the etymologically inexplicable words in our Homeric texts.

An exciting series that provides students with direct access to the ancient world by offering new translations of extracts from its key texts.

This compendium (4 vols.) studies the continuity, flexibility, and variation of structural elements in epic narratives. It provides an overview of the structural patterns of epic poetry by means of a standardized, stringent terminology. Both diachronic developments and changes within individual epics are scrutinized in order to provide a comprehensive structural approach and a key to intra- and intertextual characteristics of ancient epic poetry.

This collection explores the issues raised by the writing and reading of commentaries on classical Greek and Latin texts. Written primarily by practising commentators, the papers examine philosophical, narratological, and historiographical commentaries; ancient, Byzantine, and Renaissance commentary practice and theory, with special emphasis on Galen, Tzetzes, and La Cerda; the relationship between the author of the primary text, the commentary writer, and the reader; special problems posed by fragmentary and spurious texts; the role and scope of citation, selectivity, lemmatization, and revision; the practical future of commentary-writing and publication; and the way computers are changing the shape of the classical commentary. With a genesis in discussion panels mounted in the UK in 1996 and the US in 1997, the volume continues recent international dialogue on the genre and future of commentaries.

Homeric Morality is an attempt to answer two questions: whether or not the Homeric gods are concerned with 'justice' in human society, and what mechanism controls the social behaviour of Homeric man. It shows that the gods distribute good and bad fortune to men not in response to their moral behaviour, bus as required by fate; men, however, believe that the gods are concerned with human morality, and subsequently their behaviour is restrained by their faith in the moral gods as well as by many other forces, social and emotional. This volume, taken as a whole, serves as a sustained critique of two influential works in the field, The Justice of Zeus by H. Lloyd- Jones and Merit and Responsibility by A.W.H. Adkins.

This volume assembles sixteen authoritative articles on Homer's Odyssey that have appeared over the last thirty years. A wide variety of interpretative strategies are represented, including, in addition to traditional close readings, the approaches of comparative anthropology, narratology, feminism, and audience-oriented criticism. Papers have been selected for their clarity and accessibility, and each is informed by close attention to philological and textual detail. A full glossary and list of abbreviations have been included, and a specially written introduction puts the selections in a wider context by giving an overview of major strands in the interpretation of Homer in the second half of the twentieth century.

Groundbreaking study of the poet Simonides, approaching his work through intertextual readings of the fragments and his ancient reception.