Product Description

Performances of Greek epics customarily began with a hymn to a god or goddess - as Hesiod's "Theogony" and "Works and Days" do. A collection of 33 such poems has come down to us from antiquity under the title "Hymns of Homer". This volume contains, in addition to the hymns, fragments of five comic poems that were connected with Homer's name in or just after the Classical period (but are not today believed to be by the author of the "Iliad" or the "Odyssey"). Here too is a collection of ancient accounts of the poet's life. The hymns range widely in length: two are over 500 lines long; several run only a half-dozen lines. Among the longest are the hymn To Demeter, which tells the foundational story of the Eleusinian Mysters, and To Hermes, distinctive in being amusing. The comic poems gathered as Homeric apocrypha include "Margites", the "Battle of Frogs and Mice" and a fragment of a perhaps earlier poem of the same type called "Battle of the Weasel and the Mice". The edition of Lives of Homer contains "The Contest of Homer and Hesiod" and nine other biographical accounts.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #551350 in Books
• Published on: 2003-03-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 480 pages

TLS, 20 August 2004
...scholars and students of Greek religion and mythology will use this volume as a primary resource.

About the Author
MARTIN L. WEST is Senior Research Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford.

Customer Reviews

Translators only, please.
In this review I focus on the Homeric Hymns only. Athanassakis (1970) says' `poetry is untranslatable', and here West provides in that manner an accurate word-for-word translation of the left-page Greek verse to right-page English prose. This edition, with its slight introduction and negligible footnotes or endnotes, is made purely for the student learning Greek and looking for support along the way. Those with a lay interest will turn to Rayor (2004) or Crudden (2001).

West's introduction pauses briefly to consider the hymn-genre and its purpose, consigning them to prelude-status only. On authorship he maintains the `Homeridai' purposefully remained anonymous, considering themselves inheritors only, but then (surprisingly) names individual authors for Apollo (3) and Ares (8) as well as relatively precise dates for each hymn, given with their summary. His summary for the Hymn to Apollo (3) is a good example of the present babel-nature of work in this field; he dates the Pythian half older than the Delian and provides an interesting account of Polycrates' possible influence in usurping the older and having it lengthened to include references to Hera, the patron-goddess of Samos, and his own Delian festival to Apollo. This account is found nowhere in the other three recent popular translations, or in Clay's intelligent Politics of Olympus.

For those already acquainted with the hymns, the extra material afforded by West's close study makes tantalising reading. The Hymn to Dionysus (1), informed by a previously unpublished papyrus, is lengthened to include an account, heavily reconstructed, of Zeus' plans to send Ares and Dionysus to reconcile Hephaistus to Hera, which is completely absent in other editions. The pieces are frustratingly good, and suggest a revelation of the ambiguous Dionysus figure.

Throughout the translation West keeps up with the colloquialisms of Rayor and Cashford; he's happy to describe pirates as `freebooters from Tuscany', and Hermes' gassy omen is referred to comically in a terse footnote as simply, `a fart'. This never really compensates for the lack of verse though, and the result was a translation I felt dislocated from by the requirements of an academic focus. If you're in it for fun, chaps, then Crudden, Rayor and Cashford are what you want.