Customer Reviews

Homer: The Odyssey I-XII (Bks.1-12) (Greek Edition)

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This and its companion volume are *the* student texts with commentaries that one would want to use to read the complete Odyssey at a beginning or intermediate level. The introduction is very thorough and provides a good summary of Homeric scholarship up to the time when it was written (1950s), comments on some of the distinctive features of Homeric grammar and syntax, and gives helpful overviews of words for parts of ships and houses that make it easier to understand what's going on in certain parts of the story. It would have been nice for a glossary to be included, but you can't have everything. A great example of the type of student editions of Greek/Latin texts that were once so common.

But I have to be a little frustrated with Bristol's presentation of this fifty-some year old text. I must start by saying that I appreciate their making available at a reasonable price a book that would certainly otherwise be out of print, as they do for many classical texts; this is a great service to the unfortunately small group of modern students of the classics. But the method by which this old text is reproduced leaves something to be desired.

I would imagine that what has been done is the old text has been scanned into a computer and is now reproduced as graphical images--i.e. the actual text of the book has not been re-typeset in a format that could be edited or manipulated, but we are looking at essentially photocopies of the original pages of the book. The result is that the text is often somewhat blurry. This problem is especially bad with the Greek text in the introduction and in the commentary in the back (which is in a smaller font size than the main Greek text, which is generally readable). Often the accents, breathing marks, and even the letters themselves become blobs that are either indecipherable, or at least require a good deal of squinting to make out. I imagine that someone with worse eyesight than I have might find some of it unuseable.

In contrast, I have an earlier edition of the second volume of this text (Odyssey 13-24) which reprints the same introduction. Although this earlier edition is about 3/4 the size of this printing, the text is much clearer and more legible--presumably because it was printed from the original plates, and not photocopies of them.

Ideally, the text would be re-set digitally, and a new copy of it could be crisper and clearer than the original. Perhaps this would be too labor-intensive (and would require a proofreader with a detailed knowledge of ancient Greek) to be cost effective--but then again, the list price of this book ($32, at least twice the list price of a modern paperback of the same length) should lead one to expect a certain level of quality in the product. So I'm happy that it exists, but it has room for improvement.

Delivered when it said it would be. A few pages smashed up in delivery, not bad though.