This volume collects 24 papers from a May 2010 conference held in Thessaloniki. The title tries but inevitably fails to be inclusive: not every essay adopts a neoanalytical or oralist approach or considers the intersections between them. But who cares? Homerists do not often assemble by themselves for a Homer conference, and this one brought together an all-star cast of international scholars. Homerists will want to read the whole text, as will any classicist interested in significant parts of contemporary Homeric studies. In this review I highlight the various approaches evident in the volume. Although I learned from all the papers, limits of time and space preclude mentioning every piece.

Several authors venture on explicitly neoanalytical projects. W. Kullmann reviews the Teuthranian expedition and argues ‘that with respect to the Trojan War there was an oral tradition that goes back to the beginnings of Greek colonization but not beyond that timeframe’ (p. 20). He then looks at Iliad 2's Catalogue of Ships, detecting traces of an epic about the Argonauts but observing ‘that the leaders of the Achaeans are a conglomerate coming from quite different mythological traditions’ (p. 25). A. Kelly challenges the neoanalytical thesis that Thetis' lament in Iliad 18 comes from (or alludes to) another story that told of the death of Achilles. Thetis' lament first about and then in the presence of the living Achilles is one instantiation of a common Homeric scene, the prospective lament. The scene fits its immediate and larger contexts and does not require neoanalytical intervention to justify it. Even Thetis' incorrect declaration that Achilles will die ‘straightaway’ (autika) after Hector (Il. 18.96) – grist for the neoanalytical enterprise – parallels the unfounded fear of other prospective lamenters. I. Petropoulos studies the proem-like passages spoken by characters in the Odyssey, focussing especially on those uttered by Nestor. The old hero, in fact, may offer ‘a “quote” from the proem of a Nostoi-poem’ (p. 307). C. Tsagalis views the false yarn Odysseus tells Eumaeus as ‘an intertextual window to alternative oral traditions of Odysseus’ return' (p. 344): the point of such a citation is ultimately to de-authorise other versions of the protagonist's return. B. Currie defends the idea that Homer can allude to other poems. To bolster the neoanalytical case that the death of Patroclus evokes an earlier account of the death of Achilles, he points to the connections not only between the death of Patroclus and the death of Enkidu in Gilgamesh but also between the death of Enkidu in Gilgamesh and the death of Gilgamesh in the Sumerian The Death of Bilgames. Currie concludes, ‘[T]he Iliad not only engages in imitatio of Gilgamesh, but also imitates the way Gilgamesh itself engages in imitatio’ (p. 554). He then analyses in a similar fashion Hera's seduction of Zeus in Iliad 14. These two readings in turn rest on several assumptions and have several implications, and Currie moves to address them. He considers, for example, the evidence for a genetic relationship between ancient Near Eastern poetry and Greek epic and ponders the circumstances required for specific allusions to earlier poetry to be operative in Greek epic.

Some authors take on formulae. M. Finkelberg stresses the number of non-formulaic expressions in the Homeric epics and finds ‘that quite a few breaches in formulaic economy were due to the poet's intention to express something for which his tradition has provided no ready-made solution’ (p. 81). P. Pucci brings out the resonance of the phrase ‘looking toward the wide heaven’ (ἰδὼν εἰς οὐρανὸν εὐρύν) and discusses how the poet can adapt what follows that phrase – mention of Zeus – to its context. An oralist perspective motivates other contributions as well. For C. Dué, Iliad 10's difference stems from its concern with the lokhos or ambush, a none the less perfectly Homeric ‘traditional theme … with its own traditional language, sub-themes, conventions, and poetics’ (p. 176). A study of the phrase ‘in the dark night’ (νύκτα δι' ὀρϕναίην) exemplifies this idea. L. Muellner examines vase paintings depicting a seated Achilles ‘who covers his body and, to varying degrees, his face and head, with a copious himation’ (p. 198). He concludes, ‘these images are essentially and overtly expressions of grief, and of anger by implication only’ (p. 206, emphasis in original). Along with the elements of Achilles' name (akhos [grief] + laos) as well as Iliadic passages that forefront Achilles' akhos, these images point towards ‘a multiform of our Iliad that highlighted, not the mēnis and kholos of Achilles, as ours does, but rather his akhos, though not to the exclusion of his anger’ (p. 211). After reviewing some general points about interpreting similes, S. Saïd looks at the animal similes of Odyssey 22. She concludes in general that ‘the poet plays on the expectations created by the typicality of the similes to deceive his audience’ and in particular that some of the book's images ‘rather than exalting Odysseus’ victory seem to emphasize its cruelty' (p. 368). Stressing that ‘Panhellenic epic … can hardly supersede local traditions without being shaped by them in the process’ (p. 372), O. Levaniouk argues for the influence of a Cretan culture of song on the Odyssey. She looks not only at mentions of Crete in the poem but also at the Circe episode, and she proposes Sparta as a site of exchange.

A comparative approach is evident in other essays. E. Minchin distinguishes between personal, communicative (or social) and cultural memory and investigates two scenes (Hector and Andromache's conversation in Iliad 6; Odysseus' crying in response to Demodocus' songs in Odyssey 8) in which different characters utilise these different kinds of remembering. Detailing how others have been to the places Odysseus visits during his wanderings and how Odysseus' story precedes him, J.S. Burgess finds the hero to be ‘more like a belated traveler than an explorer’ (p. 288). References to the themes of modern-day travel writing drive the point home. S. West draws attention to Alpamysh (an epic from Central Asia most accessible in an Uzbek version) as a valuable comparandum for the Odyssey. The comparison ‘will make us better appreciate the Odyssey's complex ancestry, and the skill with which the poet selected and combined heterogeneous items in a unified narrative’ (p. 540).

I close with a query and a request. First, the query. I wonder if at this stage in our scholarly journey we need the term ‘neoanalysis’. As Kelly asks rhetorically, ‘But shouldn't we expect similarities between texts originating at this period in the history of Greek literature …?’ (p. 263 n. 105). And we cannot ignore these similarities nor the inevitable differences: as M. comments, ‘Can one abstain from addressing these questions? I fear not, pace old and new substantially acritical illusions, if such still exist’ (p. 3). To do so, we embark on historicising or contextualising analyses that do not to my mind require or even merit a discrete name. Burgess writes, ‘The term “neoanalyst” might be filched to describe loosely my methodology, which will employ diachronic evidence in the interest of synchronic meaning’ (p. 269). Yet, the process of exploring ‘diachronic evidence in the interest of synchronic meaning’ does not need a special label, as I think Burgess's comment implies. Second, the request. Prefacing her look at the Uzbek epic of Alpamysh, West rightly avers, ‘[T]here seems to be a danger of losing sight of the epics’ origins in a living tradition of oral poetry' (p. 531). Let us continue to explore the epics using trusted neoanalytical and oralist tools, but more Homerists should be studying other oral and oral-derived poetries, be they ancient or modern.