Homer, Odyssey XI

Edited with an Introduction, Translation, and Commentary
Erscheinungsjahr 2026
ISBN: 978-0-19-886185-0
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 560 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 135 mm x 216 mm

This is the only large-scale standalone edition of Odyssey XI in English. Other commentators have covered it as part of multi-volume editions covering the entire epic. They have thus given far less space to detail than does the current work where practically every other word calls for some kind of comment. Odyssey XI deals with Odysseus' visit to the world of the dead. It thus calls for a great deal of elucidation of material from the spheres of religion, myth, and genealogy. No other edition in any language goes into this kind of detail, and certainly not in English. Moreover, the editor's approach is to pay close attention to the interplay of past and present in the making of Homeric poetry. This involves not only attention to traditional referentiality but also explorations of how older meanings of words can linger in a tradition and show up in phraseology in ways that cast light on the deeper history of the Indo-European poetic tradition. As one might expect from earlier works by the same editor, close attention is paid throughout to matters of religion. In the same way, this book concentrates on linguistic details of all kinds that call for comment in a language such as Homeric Greek which can seem deceptively simple on account of its paratactic syntax but which is, on any view, rather tricky in its details.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Pulleyn, Simon

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- Preface

- Abbreviations

- Technical Terms

- The Appeal of the Odyssey

- Structure

- Style

- Synchrony and Diachrony

- Pneumatology

- Hades

- Composition

- Transmission

- Metre

- Dialect

- Sigla

- Note on Translation

- Text and Translation

- Commentary

- Bibliography

- Index

Über Autor(innen)

Simon Pulleyn read Classics at Balliol College Oxford in the 1980s, taught Classics at Merton College Oxford for most of the 1990s, practised Law in the City of London for most of the noughties, taught Law for six years after that, and is now an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Greek and Latin at University College London.