Marcianus Graecus Z. 454 [= 822], known to Homeric scholars as the Venetus A, is the oldest complete text of the "Iliad" in existence, meticulously crafted during the tenth century ce. An impressive thousand years old and then some, its historical reach is far greater. The Venetus A preserves in its entirety a text that was composed within an oral tradition that can be shown to go back as far as the second millennium bce, and the writings in its margins preserve the scholarship of Ptolemaic scholars working in the second century bce and in the centuries following. Two thousand years later, technology offers a new opportunity to rediscover this scholarship and better understand the epic that is the foundation of Western literature. The high-resolution images of the manuscript that accompany these essays were acquired by a multinational team of scholars and conservators in May 2007.

Graeme Bird examines a small group of early papyrus manuscripts of Homer's "Iliad," known as the Ptolemaic papyri, which, although fragmentary, are the oldest surviving physical evidence of the text of the Iliad, dating from the third to the first centuries BCE.

These papyri have been described as "eccentric" or even "wild" by some scholars. They differ significantly from the usual text of the "Iliad," sometimes showing lines with different wording, at other times including so-called "interpolated" lines that are completely absent from our more familiar version.

Whereas some scholars denigrate these papyri because of their "eccentricity," this book analyzes their unusual readings and shows that in fact they present authentic variations on the Homeric text, based on the variability characteristic of oral performance.