Homers Iliad - The Basel Commentary

Homers Iliad

The Basel Commentary

Homers Iliad
The Basel Commentary

Editors

Anton Bierl and Joachim Latacz

Managing Editor

Magdalene Stoevesandt

General Editor of the English Edition

S. Douglas Olson

The publication of Homers Iliad: The Basel Commentary has been made possible by the kind financial support from the following organizations:

Stavros Niarchos Foundation

Freiwillige Akademische Gesellschaft (FAG), Basel

L. & Th. La Roche Stiftung, Basel

ISBN 978-3-11-055415-1

e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-055816-6

e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-055719-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018939275

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

2018 Walter de Gruyter Inc., Boston/Berlin

Typesetting: Drlemann Satz GmbH & Co. KG, Lemfrde

www.degruyter.com

The writing and publication of the present commentary on Book 16 of the Iliad would not have been possible without the sympathetic support provided by numerous colleagues. First and foremost, I wish to offer warm thanks to the project directors Prof. Dr. Joachim Latacz and Prof. Dr. Anton Bierl as well as to team members Marina Coray, Martha Krieter-Spiro, Magdalene Stoevesandt and Katharina Wesselmann for their cordial collaboration, which continued for the past six years of the project. My thanks are due our experts for innumerable valuable bits of advice, suggestions and corrections: Rudolf Fhrer, Fritz Graf, Martin A. Guggisberg, Irene J. F. de Jong, Sebastiaan R. van der Mije, Ren Nnlist, Jrgen v. Ungern-Sternberg, Rudolf Wachter and Martin L. West (). The remaining gaps, inaccuracies and mistakes are of course fully my own responsibility. I thank my colleagues in the Rosshof, the joint premises for Classical Studies at Basel, for both lively academic exchange and all our shared moments beside and without Homer. I also wish to thank the team at the Classical Studies Library and the Basel University Library for easy collaboration. Thanks are due Xenia Buchwald and Elena Iakovou at the University of Gttingen for scrupulous corrections near the end of the project phase; they were referred to us by our publishers de Gruyter (Berlin). For this, and for the careful printing process, I offer warm thanks to the responsible parties at the publishing house among them Katharina Legutke and Serena Pirrotta.

Enormous gratitude is due the Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Frderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung , the Hamburger Stiftung zur Frderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur , the Freiwillige Akademische Gesellschaft Basel , the Frey-Clavel-Stiftung Basel , the Max Geldner-Stiftung Basel and the University of Basel for their long-standing sponsorship of the Basel Homer Commentary.

Last, but not least, I thank my family for their Homeric patience over the course of my academic career, which is now coming to an end.

In the present volume, which is based as is the case throughout the series on Martin Wests Greek text of the Iliad (Bibliotheca Teubneriana 1998/2000), relevant bibliographic items are frequently listed in rather large numbers; this is designed to enable readers to supplement, deepen or modify via their own reading the interpretations offered here. Even where not mentioned, Richard Jankos commentary (Cambridge 1992) solid, full of acute observations and often playful is always indispensable.

Basel, March 2015

Claude Brgger

Thanks are due the translation team, Dr. Sara Strack and Dr. Benjamin W. Millis with the editorship of Prof. Dr. S. Douglas Olson, not merely for translating with great diligence and expertise the German original (which is often linguistically complex) into English but also for correcting errors and omissions that had been overlooked in the German edition. I sincerely thank the above-mentioned for their pleasant collaboration and excellent work.

The present English edition would not have been possible without the generous support of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, the Freiwillige Akademische Gesellschaft and the L. & Th. La Roche-Stiftung. The Walter de Gruyter publishing house in Berlin and Boston also contributed substantially to the happy completion of this book. For their long-standing and fruitful collaboration in the context of the Basel Homeric commentary, I warmly thank Prof. Dr. Joachim Latacz and Prof. Dr. Anton Bierl as well as my colleagues Marina Coray, Martha Krieter-Spiro, Magdalene Stoevesandt and Katharina Wesselmann.

Basel, December 2017

Claude Brgger

1.In the commentary, four levels of explanation are distinguished graphically:

a) The most important explanations for users of all audiences are set in regular type. Knowledge of Greek is not required here; Greek words are given in transliteration (exception: lemmata from LfgrE , see COM 41 [1]).

b) More detailed explanations of the Greek text are set in medium type. These sections correspond to a standard philological commentary.

c) Specific information on particular sub-fields of Homeric scholarship is set in small type.

d) The elementary section, designed to facilitate an initial approach to the text especially for school and university students, appears beneath a dividing line at the foot of the page.

The elementary section discusses Homeric word forms in particular, as well as prosody and meter. It is based on the 24 Rules Relating to Homeric Language, to which reference is made with the abbreviation R. Particularly frequent phenomena (e.g. the lack of an augment) are not noted throughout but are instead recalled ca. every 50 verses. Information relating to Homeric vocabulary is largely omitted; for this, the reader is referred to the specialized dictionaries of C UNLIFFE and Autenrieth/Kaegi.

Complex issues are addressed in the elementary section as well as the main commentary; they are briefly summarized in the elementary section and discussed in greater detail in the main commentary. Such passages are marked in the elementary section with an arrow (). In contrast, references of the type cf. 73n. in the elementary section refer to notes within the elementary section itself, never to the main commentary.

2.The chapters of the Prolegomena volume are cited by the following abbreviations:

In addition:

3.Textual criticism

The commentary is based on the Teubner text of M. L. West. In some passages, the commentators favor decisions differing from that edition. In these cases, both versions of the lemma are provided; Wests text is shown first in square brackets, followed by the version favored in the commentary.