Iliad 7 is too often overlooked. Its place in between the intimate and moving events of Iliad 6 and the powerful rhetoric of Iliad 9 has meant that this book is frequently ignored in accounts of the poem (and skipped over in undergraduate lectures). This attitude towards Iliad 7 is the legacy of the perceived ‘inconsistencies’ – such as the unexpected duel between Hector and Aias or the supposedly unmotivated building of the Achaean wall – and lack of quality that made this book a favourite target of Analytic criticism throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. That long history of denigration has prevented us from appreciating the ways in which Iliad 7 helps to produce the imbricated temporality of the Iliad as it anticipates a future when those to come (καί ποτέ τις … ὀψιγόνων ἀνθρώπων, 7.87) will hear of an epic that has become past. Iliad 7 articulates this pervasive concern with time and memory by thematising the work of mourning – and the dangers of its failure – in its opposing treatments of the individual heroic body (Hector) and the nameless and hard-to-recognise dead who are buried in an ‘indiscriminate’ mound (τύμβον … ἕνα … ἄκριτον, 7.336–7 and 435–6) beneath the ephemeral Achaean wall. Iliad 7 thus speaks of the limits of the material, and the contrasting role of epos itself, in the preservation of κλέος that is the (only?) compensation the Iliad can offer for mortality.

This extensive, detailed and excellent commentary on Iliad 7 from Wesselmann attempts to offset Iliad 7's relative neglect by showing the ways in which the events of this book ‘innerhalb der Ilias entscheidend wichtige strukturelle Funktionen erfüllen’ (p. vii). The commentary follows the usual format of the Basler Kommentar series: a first short volume (Faszikel 1) contains the text – the Greek is that of West's Teubner, with an abbreviated apparatus criticus and facing German translation – whilst a longer second volume (Faszikel 2) contains the commentary. The strengths of the series are by now well known, and this important new addition is no exception. Every note contains a wealth of useful information, from larger discussions of the structure of Iliad 7 and the scenes within it to detailed accounts of specific etymological, grammatical, textual, material, metrical, ‘formulaic’ and philological elements, all supported by a distillation of over two centuries of Homeric scholarship.

One of the major strengths of this commentary is its attempt to take Iliad 7 seriously in a way that would reject both Alexandrian atheteses and the old (and not so old) Analytic arguments that have foreclosed interpretation of this book. Detailed notes on the duel between Hector and Aias, for example, explore how this scene is not ‘without stated or accomplished purpose’ (as G.S. Kirk puts it), but rather both articulates a shift in the war from the private and personal (Paris and Menelaus in Iliad 3) to a wider struggle between the ‘best’ of the Achaeans and Trojans in the absence of Achilles (e.g. nn. 1–312 [six pages], 92–122 and 109–19), and traces Hector's coming death not today (σήμερον, 7.30 and 291) but too soon (e.g. nn. 1–312, 89–90 and 244–73). Where the text has been suspected as an unmotivated ‘repetition’, Wesselmann rightly seeks to show how repetitions and irregularities are constituent elements of the Iliad's production of meaning, for example n. 44–5 on Aristarchus’ athetisation of 53 (though I missed mention of F. Schironi's work, especially her magisterial The Best of the Grammarians [2018], in all accounts of Aristarchus); the retention of 293 against Aristarchus’ objection that Hector should not use the same words as a mere herald; an excellent defence (n. 313–482) of the building of the Achaean wall and its curious ephemerality; n. 334–5 against Aristarchus’ objection to the irregularity of the funeral practice described (followed most influentially by Jacoby); and n. 466–75 on the unjustly-suspected ending of Iliad 7. Wesselmann's wider argument for the integrated, functional importance of Iliad 7 within the poem provides a guiding thread as the detailed line-by-line commentary format allows her to show that Iliad 7 is not superfluous but rather expressive of some of the poem's central concerns.

This new commentary therefore constitutes a significant improvement on Kirk's Cambridge volume, the fullest previous account of Iliad 7, in a number of ways. In addition to reading Iliad 7 on its own terms, Wesselmann makes up for the long-felt lack of modern scholarship in the Cambridge commentary by offering copious and wide-ranging bibliography on almost every point. The Basler Kommentar series also makes full use of the essential and now-complete LfgrE, which Kirk did not (although it appears in the abbreviations, it is never cited in volume 2 of his commentary). The scholia have been used to greater effect, as we continue to integrate this interpretative community into our own reading practices. The volumes themselves have been produced to a high level of presentation and accuracy, which makes them a pleasure to use (readers should note, however, that there are a few minor corrigenda in both, and that a large number of items cited in the commentary are missing from the bibliography – these omissions will no doubt be corrected in a second edition and in the forthcoming English translation). All students of Homer will want to consult this account of Iliad 7 in detail.

For all of its many strengths, this commentary also suffers from the flaws of the series in its failure to articulate the possibilities of reading and a critical practice that would go beyond the taxonomic toolbox of narratology and (excellent) general summaries of structure, ‘type-scenes’ and ring composition. Homeric language, in particular, is often dealt with simply and cursorily. Commentaries are unique sites of encounter and interpretation, where slow and close attention to form, textual problems, linguistic and metrical irregularities, and language encourages us to see more of a text's possibilities. Wesselmann's commentary, however, pays little close attention to the words of epic and to the implications of their repetition. Phrase patterns and formulae are frequently designated simply as a ‘VA’ (Vers-Anfang) or ‘VE (Vers-Ende) Formel’, with a simple ‘= / ≈’ in ways that risk closing down meaning rather than opening it up (this is no doubt due to entrenched anxieties within Homeric scholarship around language, repetition, writing and representation, and the production of meaning in the Homeric text). Yet, giving an account of what Homeric words do remains a pressing concern.

To give one paradigmatic example, the note on 118–19, ἀσπασίως γόνυ κάμψειν, begins ‘≈ 19.72f.’, the phrase is then glossed, before we are directed to a scholion and to the similar note in the corresponding Basler Kommentar volume for Iliad 19. But there is more to be said about this phrase pattern and its significant repetition in a different context. In Iliad 7 Agamemnon predicts that Hector will ‘gratefully bend his knee’ upon escaping from single combat with an Achaean hero, but in Iliad 19 the same phrase returns in the mouth of Achilles to describe those who will escape him in the coming battle (ἀλλά τιν᾽ οἴω | ἀσπασίως αὐτῶν γόνυ κάμψειν, 19.71–2). Repetition creates difference. Hector will, of course, fail to repeat his grateful escape from single combat with ‘the best of the Achaeans’, and the ‘bending the knee’ of those who will escape Achilles suggests the crumpling at the knees of Trojan bodies – and Hector's body – of those who will not. Beyond the unique iteration of this phrase pattern (only twice in the Iliad and once in Odyssey 5), a discussion sensitive to its shifting contexts might give an account of the ways in which this passage in Iliad 7 anticipates the increasingly thematised role of ‘knees’ in the coming death of Hector. After Achilles’ return, any Trojan ‘whose knees can save him’ gladly makes it into Troy (ἀλλ᾽ ἀσπασίως [West ἐσσυμένως] ἐσέχυντο | ἐς πόλιν, ὅν τινα τῶν γε πόδες καὶ γοῦνα σάωσαν, 21.610–11), but although Hector tries to escape in the speed of his knees (22.144, 204) – the same knees on which Astyanax used to sit (22.500–1) –, he cannot. Achilles ‘loosens’ Hector's knees (ἐγώ … ὅς τοι γούνατ᾽ ἔλυσα, 22.334–5), and, dying, Hector calls on the knees of Achilles in supplication (22.338 and 345). The Basler Kommentar too often misses such opportunities to read across the ever-proliferating contexts of repetition and their wider networks, for the meaning they can create (whether we call this ‘traditional referentiality’, ‘interformularity’ or a simple ‘reading’ that is the slow process of receiving the text).

My own desire for closer engagement with Homeric language and the possibilities of its interpretation should not, of course, detract in any way from the exceptional work of scholarship that is this commentary on Iliad 7. Wesselmann's volume is now the standard reference point for Iliad 7 and will be useful to both students and advanced scholars interested in the Iliad and early epic more widely (how precisely to make full use of it is a difficult question, see review of Iliad 21, CR 73 [2023], doi:10.1017/S0009840X22002578). There is a great deal to learn about Iliad 7 in every note. But there is also more to be said and more to be read in this still under-appreciated book. This excellent commentary will provide a basis, and the impetus, for the interpretative responses that are to come.