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At the moment I use a sturdy notebook. However, as my notes grow less numerous it would be nice to just scribble them in the sideline. I have this vision of one day being able to (re)read Homer in my comfy chair or sitting in the sun. Having just one book with text + notes would be more handy in that case than using a seperate notebook (not to mention the wide array of books that cover the dinner table when I read the Iliad now). So basically my question is if there is an edition of the Iliad with spacious margins or otherwise enough room for notes?

Since no-one has picked this up I'll answer but I suspect I'm atypical. If I consider my 6 years worth of notes on Homer I've got several small notepads, a few large ones and two and a half full box-binders of stuff. I constantly re-read Homer and often note (and re-note) things you see.

Texts wise I've got the OCT, the Tuebner, some crappy bilingual Greek ones, Stanford's Odyssey, Van Thiel, 1-12 Iliad by Willcock and my hand written manuscript (unfinished project), excluding the commentaries proper I own. Flicking through what I've access to now pretty much all my texts are unmarked, bar the Stanford one. West's Iliad has a sheaf of a4 paper annotated in Latin folded into the back, but nothing on the text itself. My OCT has a few metrical notes throughout the first 4 books and then I stopped that practice. Essentially I don't mark the text. I dislike writing in books unless forced to.

In the box binders I've got a sort of running commentary system going which notes vocabulary, metre and grammar wherever I was stuck at the time. I rarely re-read these notes and should throw them. I think the organising principle is handy though: I mark out the poem and book at the top (duh) and make a list of which lines covered as a sub header, say 1-40. Each smaller section is marked off e.g 1-5 and then each note has the exact line number e.g 5. My notes are then colour coded, with general obiter dicta scribbled in normal black ink.

So those were my main notes on learning the texts I guess. Now turning to my little Stanford. Hardback, clean smelling, otherwise falling apart. How I love it. My notes are written in mechanic pencil and tend to fall into the following groupings:

Words I don't know are written above the word in question. Ones which come up constantly I put a book and line number so I don't keep re-writing definitions.

Word groupings. Wherever the syntax annoys me I mark it off. I'll use square brackets to demarcate something which carries sense on its own and therefore is no trouble and I'll draw little curved lines beneath the text in order to link words which need to be taken together. If a word is particularly marked for the meaning of a sentence I'll gently underline it.

Whole sentence problems. Sometime I clearly failed to get sense of something. Here I've placed a minuscule superscript number and repeated that at the bottom of the page where I've written out a translation or something.

I've precise small handwriting when I need it so Stanford seems to have been a good text to annotate. These notes were clearly made to facilitate re-reading. I seem to have taken this system over to my Hesiod OCT but I honestly don't use that so much due to the abominable organisation. If it wasn't for the critical notes I'd have got rid of it.

Hope that helps. As you can see I use a variety of systems. You have to experiment.

Van Thiel's edition has relatively large margins. It has also the advantage that the whole Iliad fits in one volume. Also, some "heretics" still think it's the most reliable scholarly edition at present. (But for a scholarly edition, I would personnally recommend West)

Scribo, thanks for your elaborate reply.

Scribo wrote: I dislike writing in books unless forced to.

Me too, but I also dislike getting out of my chair to get a dictionnary, commentary etcetera. Also, it would be nice to take Homer with me on a holiday for example or on the train or whatever (you get the picture) without having to pack half my library. I use the OCT for the moment but the margins do not offer much room at all; at least for my -quite horrible- handwriting. Is the Tuebner any better?

Paul Derouda wrote:Van Thiel's edition has relatively large margins

What do you mean by relatively large? Larger than the OCT or the Loeb for instance?

Just a little tiny bit larger. But it's also just one volume, unlike those others. The Teubner/West is about the the same, but it's two volumes. There are some differences in the text, as the two editors have very different editorial priciples (Van Thiel tries to give a conservative presentation of the medieval manuscripts, while West is much bolder at emending, conjecturing and bracketing, and makes more use of papyrus readings).

Don't you have an iPhone? I have most of the dictionnaries in my iPhone. Probably there are dictionnary apps for other smartphones too.

Yes, I have an I-phone. That sounds very interesting. What dictionnary apps are you talking about?

Logeion and Lexiphanes are the ones I use. Get them. Now. Logeion has LSJ, Middle Liddell and Authenrieth plus other dictionaries combined; Lexiphanes just LSJ and Authenrieth, but you can access them individually, so it's faster when you want to uSe just Authenrieth. You'll have to enable the Greek keyboard at least for Logeion, which is very easy, then you just switch between dictionaries by pressing a key (when you type Latin letters, it looks for words in Latin dictionaries, when you type Greek, it uses Greek dictionaries).

Paul Derouda wrote:Get them. Now.

I. Will.
No honestely, thanks. That's one of the things I have been looking for. Furthermore I notice just now that my edition of Gaza's paraphrase of the Iliad with parallel original text has very large margins indeed and ample room between the lines to write words above or below. One more reason to make use of it more extensively.

You could buy a folder (or a scroll if you prefer ) and start writing your own manuscript, like Scribo. There you can set your own margins and you will not feel bad of writing your own book.

I've cut and pasted the greek text available on the Chicago Homer site. Once in MS Word I selected the fonts and formatting I preferred and printed it all out and placed it in a binder. Margins are plenty big enough to accommodate my sloppy handwriting. For good measure I then converted it to a pdf document and use the GoodReader app for reading on my iPad or iphone.

I believe the text is primarily drawn from Thiel's edition of the Iliad.