Homer: Iliad Book VI (Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics)

After a long hiatus, I have begun to read ancient Greek again, starting with the Symposium and Books 6 and 22 of the Iliad. I have read them with the editions in the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics. I have found the introductions and commentaries of all three to be intelligent, insightful, and erudite guides; literarily, grammatically and (in the case of the Symposium) philosophically.This is the only one in which I have found a defect. The authors have succumbed to a temptation that is inherent in explicating texts in a different language. That is trying to explain the significance of every word. When I took first-year Greek, in 1962-63, with William M Calder III, he warned us against this temptation. He used as an example a study of Moby Dick written in German, in which the author kept assigning significance to words and phrases that any English-speaker could see were being used casually, without any intended importance.This temptation can be especially misleading in explicating Homer, who, for example, has Andromache remind Hector how "dios" Achilles killed her father and brothers (lines 414 and 423).In this commentary, I find this tendency especially prominent in the significance that the authors assign to every use of particles, particularly ara/ar/ra and de/d. These particles are extremely common in Homer. Surely, he often used them for metrical reasons, or simply because they were suggested unconsciously by another word or phrase.

Excellent commentary section, much better than Book 24.

Excellent