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PREFACE
Students of Altertumswissenschaft everywhere owe much to the continuing
commitment of publishers, to the Fondazione Lorenzo Valla and the
Clarendon Press for a commentary on the Odyssey and to the Cambridge
University Press for undertaking at Geoffrey Kirk's instigation an even
grander commentary on the Iliad. A commentary on either poem of Homer,
unless it has a very narrow focus, must nowadays be the work of several
hands; such is the pressure of other duties in English-speaking lands on those
who would willingly devote all their time to the old poet. Though each of
the General Editor's collaborators has had a free hand and with it an
inescapable responsibility the commentary is in a sense a co-operative
venture. In detail Richard Janko, Nicholas Richardson and Mark Edwards
and of course the General Editor suggested many improvements and generously
made their own work available to me, but in a deeper sense the
concept of an Iliadic commentary that shaped vols. i and n (see the outline
in vol. i xv-xxv) has shaped my own work. The same assumptions are made
about unity of conception, though I follow Danek in relieving Homer of
responsibility for book i o; about the broad integrity of the text, though the
easy accessibility of the scholia in Erbse's edition is a constant reminder how
much we take on trust; and about the profound influence of oral techniques
of composition on the linguistic and narrative style of the epic. These are
assumptions universally understood and therefore discountable if not in toto
universally accepted.
Nothing in format or conventions will surprise. One particular convention,
however, is worth mention. Akhilleus and Hektor live in the mind of
every reader for whom the Iliad is a poem as well as a text, and expressions
of the kind 'Akhilleus says' or 'Hektor does' flow easily from the commentator's
pen. Such expressions are shorthand for the cumbrous 'the poet represents
his character Akhilleus saying, etc.', which it would be tedious to
repeat more frequently than is necessary to remind the reader that when
history becomes heroic poetry it becomes fiction. The Iliad relates events as
they were conceived and structured in the poet's mind; how that was done
it is the primary function of commentary to elucidate, while recognizing
that the completeness of the picture and sequence of events is subject to
fallibility, indifference, and the poet's own evaluation. The latter is the
province of narratology, an art too novel for its application to Homer yet
to have produced consensus; my debt on this front to de Jong will be
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