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Preface
evident. Indebtedness to the thoughts and insights of others inevitably
weighs heavily on this commentary. It is lightened only by the thought that
bibliography is an inescapable problem for any late twentieth-century commentator
on a major classical text. It would be easy to compile a list of two
or three hundred items, in the manner of a doctoral thesis, or indeed twice
that number, but such a list is of little real help to the majority of users. The
bibliography that precedes the commentary is exactly what it is entitled, a
list of works cited frequently enough to justify the abbreviation of their
titles; it has no pretence to be exhaustive even as a list of indispensable
Homerica. In the commentary itself no attempt is made to cumulate secondary
literature, but the work of Burkert, Chantraine, M. W. Edwards,
Fenik, Latacz, Meister, Redfield, Schein, and the contributors to Archaeologia
Homerica, to name the most obvious, has left its mark on every page.
References are made, not to cite a source, but to indicate where further
information beyond what is appropriate to a commentary may be found or
to provide a point of entry into always voluminous scholarship.
Finally thanks are due, for their patience as well as their labours, to the
officers of the Cambridge University Press and especially to their copyeditor,
the ever-vigilant Susan Moore.
Bladon, Oxon., January 1991
xiv
J. B. H.