B. rightly calls attention to the focus on members of the lower class in the second half of the Odyssey, who seem to support the moral law against the aristocratic suitors; remarkable, because we tend to think of epic as addressed to an aristocratic audience. B. takes an admirable Unitarian stand against those who see these books as rife with additions and alterations. He looks forward to the critical rehabilitation of the second half of the Odyssey, too many times thought to be an appendage to Books 9–12, when those books are a prelude to the real story. In an introduction that admirably summarises the literary qualities of these books, he explains in clear prose how the poet avoids clear closure of incidents, but weaves closural elements in and out. He uses a pattern of recognition combined with narrative that drives the story slowly forward. B. is much interested in the mechanics of recognition, and he gives a good summary in the introduction. A good deal of the narrative in the latter half of the Odyssey is designed to postpone the recognition between Odysseus and Penelope, because then the song, and all its pleasure, will end.
He turns to the problem of lower-status figures in the Odyssey. Is this Homer's invention, or did epic allow such characters ordinarily? In any event, it is striking how Homer elevates lower-class persons by describing their behaviour in terms appropriate to their superiors, for example in calling Eumaeus a ‘leader of men’. Lower-class persons also tell stories much as their superiors. In the second half of the Odyssey the lower classes come to represent excellence while the upper class aristocrats are gluttonous, greedy, treacherous and, of course, soon dead. The stories that Odysseus and Eumaeus tell are not what we expect in epic: set in everyday life, they make Odysseus out to be a bumbler and even a fool, and the story of Eumaeus is filled with bathetic sentiment. I wonder if B. is right in thinking in terms of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ forms of literary expression – perhaps such low-life stories were always a part of epic – but the point is strong and worth making. The focus on the lower social strata is accompanied by an indifference to the glory of the Trojan War, whose evil effects are noted again and again. This is a poem about the everyday world of real Greek life, not about the magnificent achievements of heroic warfare (I hope that this does not mean that B. attributes authorship to a second poet, but I fear it does).
In a lucid presentation of Homeric metre B. suspects, no doubt rightly, that cola up to the masculine or feminine caesura of the third foot and after it to the end of the line were the original units of composition, not ‘feet’. Many formulas fit this division. His rules of prosody are correct, but B. should mention that a good deal of Homer does not really scan, or can be forced to scan only by manipulating complex rules of which Homer was certainly not aware. Also, he confuses the history of writing with the history of pronunciation; for example, where digamma was heard, it was certainly written in any original or early text of Homer, and only later did it drop from the orthography as pronunciation changed.
He summarises features of the ‘epic dialect’, really not a dialect because it was ‘spoken’ by no one. He points out the Aeolic features in this dialect, as opposed to its generally Ionic flavour. Then in a 25-page exegesis B. reviews most of what is known about Homeric ‘grammar’. This is a highly technical discussion and I wonder if it is required when the information given is available in any of the standard sources. None the less it is there, and some students will refer to it.
However, it is hard to agree with some of the views in the introduction to the text. B. betrays an unconscious prejudice when he writes ‘we do not know for certain where or when the poems reached something like their present form’. But the poems reached ‘their present form’ at the moment of their recording. Any form they might have had before that time is entirely hypothetical. The poems seem to have been recorded on Euboea, or in the Euboean circuit, sometime in the late-ninth or early-eighth century, a possibility that B. admits, then imagines that because others hold other views, we can never say for sure. It is a polite but misleading reticence. Where the evidence in strong, we should go there.
Then when he writes of the early text of the Odyssey he says, ‘Part of the difficulty here is that, during the period down to the fifth century, the transmission will have been predominantly oral’ – but not the transmission of the text! The text is physical, material and has a history of its own independent of any oral versions, about which we can in any event know nothing.
The text is B.'s own, though he has not consulted the MSS. It is provided with a spare apparatus criticus. The bibliography is abundant and modern. The notes that accompany the commentary are exemplary. B. gives just the right amount of information, whether it is on the history of the word, or its usage, or background of a custom. Every so often he intersperses a prose summary of the text coming up, marvels of compression and lucidity. I kept learning new things.
Sometimes B. falls to the vice endemic to student commentaries, to give numerous references that the student will never take advantage of: for example, when his says ‘On phrenes in Homer, see Sullivan 1988, esp. 166 on this combination; Clarke 1999:61–126, esp. 102 on this passage’. Or when explaining ageleie he suggests that the reader ‘Cf. West on Hes. Th. 318’. No one is going to go to these secondary sources to learn about phrenes in Homer or ageleie. Why does B. not just summarise the points made in these outside references? It is a kind of showing off, a scholastic style of commentary. It is not friendly to classical studies.
All the same, this book is utterly competent, and wonderfully clear. B. has not absorbed some of the insights about Homer recently won, but in its explication of the text, the book is a model, a pleasure and of certain use to graduate students.
