Homer - Odyssey - Book I

[Adelheid]

I will share my reading experience of Book I of the Odyssey in this thread.

As I trod along, I will create a new thread for every book.

[helios]

I assume you're reading it in the Greek...Oxford Classical Text or another version? I look forward to your comments. I hope to read the same within six months.

[jswilkmd]

Hi,

Last summer I worked through the first couple hundred lines of book one of the Odyssey. I found a used copy (check on amazon) of Perrin and Seymour's Eight Books of Homer's Odyssey and found it very helpful. In many respects, it's like Pharr, but easier to use and with a better commentary.

Let me know how your odyssey through The Odyssey is going.

[Adelheid]

I was sidetracked a bit by the Australian Open tennis tournament lately, but I am going ahead full steam with the Odyssey now.

Stay tuned, I would say and any and all comments will be very welcome.

[mingshey]

Hi,

Last summer I worked through the first couple hundred lines of book one of the Odyssey. I found a used copy (check on amazon) of Perrin and Seymour's Eight Books of Homer's Odyssey and found it very helpful. In many respects, it's like Pharr, but easier to use and with a better commentary.

Let me know how your odyssey through The Odyssey is going.

http://www.archive.org/stream/eightbook ... 3/mode/2up

This is it, right? ... Though the first couple of dozen paragraphs in the introduction seem to be missing.

Thanks so much for the info!

[edonnelly]

Though the first couple of dozen paragraphs in the introduction seem to be missing.

It looks like that copy is missing quite bit. Here's one from Google (for some reason the front page in google makes this book look like it's preview only, but when I go to read it, it gives me a pdf link to download the whole thing.):

http://books.google.com/books?id=5yYBAAAAYAAJ


(I've really lost faith in the archive, it's quality is so variable but generally poor, and the files tend to take up 3x as much space as their Google equivalents.)

[jswilkmd]

edonnelly--that's it! The first one is missing quite a bit, yes.

[mingshey]

http://books.google.com/books?id=5yYBAAAAYAAJ

It doesn't work for me. Perhaps the access from my locale is limited.

[Adelheid]

I finished book 1 during my holiday, I suppose I needed some really free time to get me started. I will gather my impressions and some questions from the notes I made and will post them later this week.

Must say it was encouraging that I managed to read book 1 in just two weeks. That means that I can finish the Odyssey way before I retire

[jswilkmd]

Excellent! I'll pull out my notes from when I worked through it a few years back.

[Scribo]

http://books.google.com/books?id=5yYBAAAAYAAJ

It doesn't work for me. Perhaps the access from my locale is limited.

Same. I wonder if someone might point us elsewhere?

[Adelheid]

First observation/question:

Starting out in the Odyssey, I was first struck by the occurrence of the possessive pronoun, which I do not recall to show up very often in the Iliad. The first appears in line 4 (ὃν κατὰ θυμόν), and more examples can be seen in lines 5, 21, 41. Line 29 shows a κατὰ θυμόν example as I know it from the Iliad: no possessive pronoun there.

I don't know whether this could be meter-induced, or has to do with more emphasis than was needed in the Iliad, it just stood out for me.

My commentary (W.B. Stanford) doesn't mention this, so I might be imagining things.

[jswilkmd]

First observation/question:

Starting out in the Odyssey, I was first struck by the occurrence of the possessive pronoun, which I do not recall to show up very often in the Iliad. The first appears in line 4 (ὃν κατὰ θυμόν), and more examples can be seen in lines 5, 21, 41. Line 29 shows a κατὰ θυμόν example as I know it from the Iliad: no possessive pronoun there.

I don't know whether this could be meter-induced, or has to do with more emphasis than was needed in the Iliad, it just stood out for me.

My commentary (W.B. Stanford) doesn't mention this, so I might be imagining things.

Well, the possessive pronoun does appear in the Iliad (Book 1, lines 83, 496, 533; Book 2, line 662, etc.). Pharr, in his notes on l. 83 (§190), states that "the possessive pronoun (referring to ἑοῖσι) is emphatic..."

Apart from this comment, Pharr doesn't treat the possessive pronoun as otherwise odd or unusual. He introduces it in §187 (the vocabulary to ll. 81-85) and certainly gives its paradigm in his grammar (§764). Neither Seymour, in the introduction (§45d) to Perrin and Seymour's Eight Books of Homer's Odyssey, nor Steadman, in his introduction (p. xi) to Homer's Odyssey 6-8, say anything about the possessive pronouns being particularly emphatic, but seem to take them for granted.

To be sure, it's probably used for metrical padding in many instances. But if it strikes you as odd, perhaps it's because you're used to Attic, a dialect in which these forms do not appear. Either that or you're imagining things.

What I found to be interesting about its use in the examples you've mentioned is the lost digamma with which it began. The presence of the lost digamma is usually apparent from its effects on the meter and this helps distinguish it from the relative pronoun. Look, for example, at l. 4 of the Odyssey. Note the hiatus (lack of contraction) with ἄλγεα. Contrast this with the ἄλγε' ἔθηεκεν in l. 2 of the Iliad. This is because the following ὃν originally began with a consonant, ϝ (see Pharr §§1173-4). Similarly, the lost ϝ is apparent in l. 5, because it causes metrical lengthening of the final syllable of ἀρνύμενος, which precedes it (see Pharr §1167.2). Same thing with lengthening of the final syllable of πάρος in l. 21.

But look carefully at l. 41. In this line, the possessive pronoun is preceded by καὶ, which scans as a short syllable. This shouldn't have happened if the possessive were here treated as if it began with a consonant (the digamma), because καὶ would be metrically shortened only if followed by a vowel (see Pharr §1173). This--to me, at least--implies scribal alteration or editing of this particular line at a later date, after the digamma fell into disuse.

Anyway, I love looking at this sort of stuff in detail.

Jim

[Adelheid]

Hi Jim,

That's a lot of info there! Concerning the possessive pronoun, no, I'm not more familiar with Attic. The last few years I have only been reading the Iliad. Attic is something I last read in highschool, many, many years ago. Well, it must be me imagining things then.

I'm going to start with book II this weekend, so I'm hoping you will hang around

My special focus will be verbs, more precisely subjunctive and optative and their different meanings (my weak spot).

[jswilkmd]

Yep, I'll be around.