Uncovering Writing

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

R.C. Jebb provides a great introduction, especially with his information on geography and history. The whole work is filled with nice little snippets like this, always well documented back to the Homeric texts, scholia, or other scholarly writings. One such interesting tidbit was the suggestion that Homer knew of Greece and Egypt, but nothing of the great empires of Assyria and Babylonia.

The book is divided into four sections, each addressing an important part of Homer and how we relate to the person, text and its history. The first section deals with the general literary characteristics of the poems. He then turns an exciting light on the Homeric world and follows that with a look at how Homer was received in antiquity. The final section deals with the Homeric question, i.e. who wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey, how were they written and when were they written. It goes into textual analysis, history, geography, language (e.g. the digamma), etc. The notes at the end of the third section lists the important sources of the actual Homer texts (p. 101, notes 1&2). Jebb also ends the book with a list of important Homer editions (Greek and translations) as well as scholarly books (Note, p. 198-202).

I really enjoyed that he discussed the Epic Cycle, of which the Iliad and Odyssey are a part. There are eight main stories that cover the period from before the Trojan War all the way to the death of Odysseus by his son with Circe. The pieces are:

1. Cypria: Peleus & Thetis’s wedding up to beginning of Iliad opens
2. The Iliad
3. Aethiopis: the contest between Ajax & Odysseus for Achilles’s armor
4. Little Iliad: up to the capture of Troy
5. Ilioupersis: the fall of Troy and the departure of the Greek forces
6. The Nostoi: the returns of Menelaus and Agamemnon
7. The Odyssey
8. The Telegony: the story of Odysseus’s son with Circe and how he comes to Ithaca and unwittingly kills his father. After this, Telemachus marries Circe and Telegonus marries Penelope