Apologies if this is an oft-asked question; I could not find it searching the site. I am looking to buy a Greek-text Iliad, and that not-so-easy. I’d like a good quality book or paperback, even used, good binding, good paper, large and easy-to-read font, open-spaced text with margins for notes.
Greeks in Greece including Greek students in Greek colleges must have access to many editions of Homer’s original text, as most English and Americans have in their bookstores with bibles. Can anyone reference a site where they can be reviewed and even purchased? And what are folks on this site using?
Hi,
Welcome to Textkit! As to your question, I think we need a little more information in order to make the best recommendation. If you have no Greek and are just starting out, you might want to work through an introductory Greek course (Athenaze, JACT Reading Greek, Mastronarde’s Introduction to Attic Greek) before attempting the Iliad. If you’ve already completed an introductory course in Attic, then you could try Benner’s Selections from Homer’s Iliad . If you’re a modern Greek speaker, here’s a site that might interest you: http://mikrosapoplous.gr/iliada/
Reading Homer in the original requires some work, but it’s well worth it!
Hi. Thank you for those. I saw them on Amazon. And it was in part the reviews of them that got me thinking about what editions Greeks buy - on the assumption there are such things. I imagine a modern Greek has about as much access to Homeric Greek as a modern English speaker has to to Chaucer. But still, if they want a copy, do they buy the same editions, with the same issues, at the same prices, as English/American students? Anyway, it’s turning out to be an interesting problem, and surprising that it’s not easy to solve.
Possibly actual Greeks will answer, but my understanding is that academics in Greece at least use the same editions as international scholars. For example, you can buy Teubners printed in Greece cheaply at Kardamitsa on Ippokratous St in Athens.
Hi watch156, another solution would be to make it yourself. Grab the text from a public source online, format it exactly the way you like in a word processor, and then send it to a bookbinder or a site like Lulu.
When I can’t find hardcopy books in the format I like, this is what I do. e.g. I use Donovan’s book on advanced greek prose comp a fair bit and Goodwin’s book on moods and tenses regularly, but couldn’t find a hardcopy edition that I liked, and so I sent them off to be bound in leather with gold tooling. The three volumes of Donovan in a single book is a much more useful format than what I could find elsewhere.
Many people here will have multiple editions of the Iliad serving different purposes I expect. My go-to for reading is Barnes’ 1711 edition with large text, Latin translation in the margin and an extract of the most helpful scholia for reading in the footnotes. This has a pretty funny history (it was funded by convincing his spouse that it contained the wisdom of Solomon, or something like that). I recently paid a fairly substantial amount to have the cover and endpapers restored (it had heavy use because it was originally in a Paris library in the 1700s). But in other use cases I need the critical edition, for which I use West’s Teubner, or Monro’s helpful little two-volume edition with useful endnotes plus a shortened form of his grammar in the first volume.
Neither of these suits your particular use case, and so the easiest is to put it together yourself I think.
In Greece people use the same editions as in the West, as others have already said. I’ve gathered some bibliography in my Greek readings of the text (below in the description box). You can check it out here. Besides, I have worked editions of Homer, Hesiod and Aeschylus with Greek scholia and paraphrase (even exercises) which I can send privately to you if you are truly interested.
As others have said, Homer requires some work but it’s worth it!
Maybe an older generation Teubner would be your best bet. Teubner have slightly larger margins than Oxford Classical Texts (the blue books). There should be a ton of 'em out there, just make sure the format is right, as they also used to publish ‘minor’ editions on an even smaller format than the oxfords.