Yes I have the second volume of that version. Elsewise there is, ignoring the Cambridge Green and Yellows etc:
A B Lloyd Commentary on Herodotos II (only 1-98)
L Scott’s Historical Commentary on VI
D Ascheri, A Lloyd and A Corcella on I-IV
Then the usual stuff, monographs, edited volumes, extended discussions (e.g on the logoi in V). Obviously I could find more by digging around the stacks, but this stuff is cited a lot so. I don’t mind the Cambridge Green and Yellows but they’re expensive and I find students have a horrid tendency to heavily annotate them like little bastards whom if I ever were to catch the papers would have to write an Aeschylean tragedy of an article.
EDIT: I also need to point out that my primary interest in Herodotos is his relation to ethnographic, geographic and epic traditions on one hand and epistemology on the other, rather than purely literary or historical this time around. Again whilst I’m happy Herodotos is going forward, anyone really should feel free to throw in an alternative.
OK, so there’s no reading plan yet, I think? I will start reading book 1 from this friday onwards. Don’t know whether posting about it will be useful. Without a plan, discussions tend to go off topic or into too much detail very soon.
Is someone still on? Can we agree on some sort of tempo (1 book a month, every two weeks?), which books to skip, which books to read?
I finished Plato’s Symposium today (what a great read!) and will start Herodotus book I tomorrow. However I will be rather slow, since I intend to take up North & Hillard’s Greek Prose Composition as well.
After listening to most of Elizabeth Vandiver’s 24 lectures on Herodotus I have decided to do some more work in Sophocles. Just personal preference. Sophocles is dealing with issues that I find more compelling than reading ancient historians.
I have made a curious discovery after listening about 100 of Elizabeth Vandiver’s lectures. I am not really terribly enthusiastic about the ancient Greek foundations of western civilization. Plato and Aristotle leave me cold. I read Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Mark Twain at a tender age. There is something in Sophocles and Euripides that I can connect with.
Fair enough, I guess things just got a bit lost. God knows I’ve been rushed off my feet.
However, Sophokles sounds like a good alternative, he works well with Homer and Herodotos anyway (the exact nature of the link between him and Herod. is debated incidentally). But yeah, I can sort of stand Sophokles, I get great use out of his fragments and recently re-read his entire extant corpus so that can be fun.
Trachiniae is surprisingly good, I remembered thinking it was lame as an under-graduate but it turns out to be pretty cool.
I will give you my -highly subjective- opinion as soon as I have one. However, I don’t think Herodotus has the reputation of being very difficult, but I might be wrong of course. And yes, I am using Steadman. Thanks for the link to the beta-version of Oedipus Rex.
