CUP (2025) p/b 259pp £22.99 (ISBN 9781107424845)
This fills a much-needed gap in CUP’s ‘Green and Yellow’ series of Greek and Latin texts widely used in universities and schools. Much-needed because Book IX must be one of the most popular in the classroom and will be for many students their first experience of ‘real’ Homer. So as well as setting the book in its literary and historical context, the editor is obliged to include a description of Homeric language and metre as an essential tool for anyone grappling for the first time with non-Attic Greek.
B.— evidently a philologist, to judge from more than half of his self-referential 18 bibliography citations—predictably delivers the goods. At times a curiously Victorian note creeps in—a metrical anomaly is described as being ‘prohibited’ (by whom?)—and one does feel that the average Homeric tyro could get through the Cyclops story without detailed excursuses on epic diectasis, brevis in longo, and Hermann’s Bridge (‘violated only sporadically’). B. might reply that descriptive grammar and metrical rules are there for reference only; true, but it’s a question of presentation, of what is helpful for reading Homeric Greek, of too much matter thrown at the reader too soon. On the other hand, it is a pleasure to see a section devoted to particles, and how they add tone, emphasis and gesture to the narrative.
Along with his love of taxonomy, B. cannot resist decorating his introduction with technical-sounding labels which add nothing to what he wants to say since he always glosses them in the same sentence. Who needs to know that when Odysseus tells the story the discourse is ‘homodiegetic’ but when someone embedded in the narrative speaks it is ‘intradiegetic’ (he means ‘endodiegetic’)? A discussion of ‘interformularity’ turns out surprisingly to be Homer’s anticipatory version of intertextuality. Thus, ‘(interformularity) presupposes detailed knowledge of the poem as a tight composition. It is important that the repeated phrase imports into its context more than the grammatical meaning of the earlier occurrence of the formula, since the original context is associated with it.’ Yes, we like to detect the hand of the controlling poet over, say, occurrences of the key word atasthaliai; but it is hard to believe that he intended the two lines that figure twice in this book describing relaxed eating and drinking (161-2 and 556-7) to draw a contrast between the status of the shipmates’ two dinners, marked by the provenance of their food: in the latter case ‘the narrator encode(s) the consumption of the Cyclops’ sheep…as anomalous, since the animals are domesticated and their meat is not ‘unlimited’ (as it was in 161-2); and the commentary at 557 adds: ‘The use of the formula underscores the incongruity of the present sacrifice and meal.’ Simpler to observe that in oral poetry similar occasions tend to be described in similar words.
B.’s other consuming interest seems to be in folktale and ethnography, a field notably explored by Denys Page in his Sather Lectures, with a lighter touch. His wide-ranging treatment of what he calls the matrix-narrative, ‘The Wily Trickster and The Ogre Blinded’, with its many congeners in other cultures, is exemplary. It is when we come to a substantial section in the introduction marked ‘Interpreting the Tale’— not Homer’s tale, note, but the matrix-narrative— that we start to wonder where this is going. Doubts are confirmed by a remarkable excursus into ‘Colonialism’: ‘The Cyclops episode is a tale of the hostile encounter between travelers [sic; B. teaches at Yale] and an indigenous population that ends in victory…for the visitors.’ The Cyclopes’ inability to sail ships and cultivate their offshore island apparently ‘adds to the colonially charged narrative between an… advanced explorer and his primitive adversary’. In fact, says B., ‘Odysseus (?Homer) intends his narrative to be a primordial Robinsonade (as in Crusoe), a genre of fiction taking its name from Defoe’s novel ‘in which a man, cut off from civilisation, succeeds in establishing culture by means of discipline, reason and technology in the face of hostile nature or indigenous populations, thus establishing himself as a prime example of Western ‘enlightenment’’.
It is not uncommon and sometimes thought-provoking in scholarly discussions of antiquity to map contemporary theory on to ancient texts; but it is of limited usefulness to those interested in finding out how heroic oral poetry, whether or not coexisting with a written text, works to construct an episode in a long story.
The above observations are not intended to undermine the usefulness of B.’s introduction. He knows his Homer, and his commentary is full of the kind of explanation and discussion that will both help the newcomer to translate and understand Homer as well as inspiring those with a few Homeric books under belts to explore further. It is more a matter of tone and emphasis, of choosing what to highlight and what to ignore. In this it possibly reflects different pedagogic approaches to Greek language and literature on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Students over here will need to be reminded that they are reading a book in one of the two foundation poems of European literature.
Anthony Verity