This book offers students of Greek and scholars interested in Greek literature the first English-language commentary on the "Battle of Frogs and Mice", a short animal epic ascribed to Homer in the ancient world. The book includes a contextualizing introduction covering issues of literary genre, literary history and the language of Homeric Greek. In addition to a revised Greek text, the volume also offers a new translation of the poem. The commentary furnishes readers with extensive linguistic and literary information so that they may investigate the problem of the poem's character and authorship on their own. A full vocabulary at the back ensures this is a one-stop shop for students reading the poem.

Widely revered as the father of Western literature, Homer was the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the epic poems which immortalised such names as Achilles, Cyclops, Menelaus, and Helen of Troy. In this vivid introduction, Elton Barker and Joel Christensen celebrate the complexity, innovation, and sheer excitement of Homer's two great works. Investigating the controversy surrounding the man behind the myths, they ask who Homer was and whether he even existed. Making parallels between Homeric hexameter and rap, and between his battle scenes and The Lord of the Rings, the authors highlight how his hugely influential epics deal with ageless questions that still confront us today. Perfect for new readers of the great poet and full of insights that will delight Homeric experts, this book will inspire you to discover - or rediscover - his masterpieces first-hand.

Homer's Iliad and Odyssey are the only early Greek heroic epics to have survived the transition to writing, even though extant evidence indicates that they emerged from a thriving oral culture. Among the missing are the songs of Boeotian Thebes. Homer's Thebes examines moments in the Iliad and Odyssey where Theban characters and thematic engagements come to the fore. Rather than sifting through these appearances to reconstruct lost poems, Elton Barker and Joel Christensen argue that the Homeric poems borrow heroes from Thebes to address key ideas-about politics, time, and genre-that set out the unique superiority of these texts in performance. By using evidence from Hesiod and fragmentary sources attributed to Theban tradition, Barker and Christensen explore Homer's appropriation of Theban motifs of strife and distribution to promote his tale of the sack of Troy and the returns home. As Homer's Thebes shows, this Theban material sheds light on the exceptionality of the Homeric epics through the notions of poetic rivalry and Panhellenism. Furthermore, by emphasizing a nonhierarchical model of "reading" the epics derived from oral-formulaic poetics, this book contributes to recent debates about allusion, neoanalysis, and intertextuality.

This book offers students of Greek and scholars interested in Greek literature the first English-language commentary on the "Battle of Frogs and Mice", a short animal epic ascribed to Homer in the ancient world. The book includes a contextualizing introduction covering issues of literary genre, literary history and the language of Homeric Greek. In addition to a revised Greek text, the volume also offers a new translation of the poem. The commentary furnishes readers with extensive linguistic and literary information so that they may investigate the problem of the poem's character and authorship on their own. A full vocabulary at the back ensures this is a one-stop shop for students reading the poem.