A very good book (or actually 3 books) is the Homer Encyclopedia. It’s basically an encyclopedia on all things Homer: the epics themselves, Homeric scholarship and later reception of Homer, and it’s aimed at Homerists of any level. Unfortunately, it’s quite expensive, but go for it if you can find an affordable copy. Any good university library should have it as well.
I found this book very useful in keeping track of the action in the Iliad:
I am using the second revised edition of " A reading Course in Homeric Greek part I and II." Not the third edition. Note: Do not use third edition, it is terrible. Use the original 2nd revised. A great and easy way to approach Homer. Also, Clyde Pharr and a new course by the Teaching company, Greek 101: Learning an Ancient Language. He uses Homeric Greek to teach Ancient Greek.
Also use Geoffrey Steadman’s Books with Greek Text and Facing Vocabulary.
There is a answer key to the “a Reading Course in Homeric Greek” as well. From Amazon, 2007 edition. It has all the answers and translations for books I and II for the 2nd revised editions. A great way to test your knowledge as you go. I had the third edition and it was not as beautiful and cut a lot of information. the 2nd revised has color pictures of Greek Art and Archeology to go along with the readings.
Another source:
The Iliad of Homer a Parsed Interlinear Text (Books 1-24)
Front Cover
John James Jackson
www.lighthousedp.com, Jul 11, 2008 - Foreign Language Study - 4491 pages
0 Reviews
The Iliad of Homer a Parsed Interlinear Text (Books 1-24) is presented in its entirety together with morphological tags, lemmas, and English glosses. This presentation lays bare the text for Greek students and scholars who wish to ascertain the details and nuances of language in the original form. This interlinear text was produced to facilitate the study of Homeric Greek at once serving both inductive and deductive language learning methodologies. It opens to the reader a portal exposing a living grammar and providing an excellent platform for comprehensive study.
Mention should be made here of the chicago homer a very valuable resource. http://homer.library.northwestern.edu/html/application.html
I don’t want to be contentious, but I don’t see any value in those parsed interlinears, and I think they’re more of an impediment than a help in learning to read the Iliad. The Iliad isn’t as difficult as it seems at first blush. The main difficulties are the forms and the vocabulary. You should get used to the forms quite rapidly.
Benner’s Iliad is particularly good for getting your feet wet because new vocabulary is presented at the foot of the page. He gives you a generous selection that includes all the main parts of the poem. (There’s a lot of material in the Iliad that is extraneous to the principal story-line–not that I would give up any of it, including Book 10, which many believe to be an interpolation though no one has been able to demonstrate that conclusively.)
If you go for Benner’s Iliad, it’s a good idea to buy an older used hardbound edition on-line. Copies are plentiful at reasonable prices, and the print is clearer than the later photocopied editions. Make sure it’s in good shape, and isn’t covered with someone’s scribblings.
This is nearly two years late, but in response to “where can I get a copy of Chantraine’s book?”, try amazon.fr.
heres plenty of Chantraine PDFs:
Please do not post links to books that are still under copyright. I edited the post and removed the link.
In the year or so that I’ve been reading Homeric Greek on and off, I’ve found Cunliffe’s A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect to be the best and simplest aid. It references the line numbers where any specific usage of a word occurs, making an additional commentary less necessary. I recommend investing in a hardbound copy of it; the paperback one is flimsy and somewhat annoying to flip through while you’re focusing on the poem.
Thanks for the tip Paul. I was looking for more information about Homer and this Homer Encyclopedia sounds just about right, it could save me time and effort. If I wanted to buy one, how much would it cost (approximately)?
Thank you everyone for your feedback.
That’s the problem. At present, the price at amazon.com is $500. When it came out a couple of years ago, it was about half that, I think - not cheap but not impossibly expensive. But who is going to pay $500 for it? This sort of thing happens often with books of this sort once they are out of print. It seems that some booksellers hoard them and then sell them at impossible prices.
I’m sure you’ll be able to find it in any decent university library as well.
I have a spare copy, Paul, waiting for a worthy recipient. So if you don’t have your own copy (only if!), it’s yours. Send me a pm if you want it.
So the price of old books isn’t necessarily set by value. It tends to be set by the algorithm used by the world’s largest bookseller (Amazon). This algorithm has several flaws, but the biggest one is that one stupid buyer will make an old book more expensive for everyone.
However, there are ways to hack this algorithm. Pick out the insanely priced reference work of your choice. It should be something very low volume, with one copy sold in the world every few months. Set your own copy for sale cheap. In the description, list it as “Horribly damaged. Fire, water damage. Don’t buy, you dummy.” Humans will stay away, but all the algorithm will see is a copy of the $500 reference work going for $50 (or $25). After a month or two, the price on all of the used copies will drop to match yours.
If you feel bad about this, don’t. Used booksellers are using all sorts of tricks to push the algorithm in the other direction.
Wish it had been that price when first published on February 28, 2011. I purchased it from Amazon on May 6, 2011 for $423.63. Wiley-Blackwell books are generally not cheap. It is currently priced at $680 on Wiley’s website. So the Amazon price is a “good deal”.
It is rather bizarre that on Amazon the used copies of this set are priced at over $750. 
Value is in the eye of the beholder.
One great thing about the internet is that it makes it damn easy to find what used to be a hard to find book. But, as you’ve correctly noted, that information leads to highly inflated prices.
Thanks mwh, but I already have one! As for the price, I mixed up the price in $ and in £, which means that I paid much more for it than I remembered. Denial I guess.
Anyway, I simply don’t understand why a book like this should be made so expensive, intended as it is for quite a large audience and not just for hardcore specialists. I’m sure it was largely funded from taxpayer money, so that too makes it seem almost unethical that it’s not priced so as to be available for everyone.