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An examination of passages in Homeric texts which either present semantic or logical difficulties or are incoherent or inconsistent. Extracts from the Iliad and the Odyssey are translated into English with a detailed analysis of ambiguous terms.
Here is the first survey of the surviving evidence for the growth, development, and influence of the Neoplatonist allegorical reading of the Iliad and Odyssey. Professor Lamberton argues that this tradition of reading was to create new demands on subsequent epic and thereby alter permanently the nature of European epic. The Neoplatonist reading was to be decisive in the birth of allegorical epic in late antiquity and forms the background for the next major extension of the epic tradition found in Dante.
Homer's mighty epic, the Iliad, is the first work of western literature and one of the defining masterpieces of our culture. The purpose of this new line-by-line commentary is to help as wide an audience as possible to understand and appreciate the poem through the best of recent scholarship on the man and his work. Peter Jones has selected three of the most widely used translations on which to base his commentary, those of E.V. Rieu (revised and updated by Peter Jones), Martin Hammond, and Richmond Lattimore. There is a useful introduction to the whole work and separate short introductions to each book of the Iliad. Each passage selected for comment is given a line-reference and quoted from all three translations.