A NEW COMMENTARY ON THE ILIAD; J. Latacz (ed.): Homers Ilias: Gesamtkommentar, auf der Grundlage der Ausgabe von Ameis-Hentze-Cauer. Prolegomena; I. Book 1, fasc. 1. Text und Übersetzung; fasc. 2. Kommentar. Pp. xii + 256, xx + 39, xvi + 213. Munich and Leipzig: K. G. Saur, 2000. Cased, DM 98, 58, 118 (or 156 for the two fascicles). ISBN: 3-598-74300-9, 3-598-74302-5, 3-598-74303-3

In spite of the fact that radically new discoveries were made about the Homeric poems in the twentieth century, particularly by Milman Parry and W. Schadewaldt, they were not superseded in either language until G. S. Kirk put together a team for an English language commentary that was published by Cambridge University Press in six volumes without the Greek text between 1985 and 1993. The volume of Prolegomena has the following chapters: (1) On Homeric Commentaries, by Latacz; (2) History of the Text, by West; (3) Formulas and Oral Poetry, by Latacz; (4) Homeric Grammar, by Wachter; (5) Metre, by Nnlist; (6) The Figures [i.e. Characters]: Gods, by Graf; Humans, by Stoevesandt; (7) The Structure of the Iliad, by Latacz; (8) The Poetics of the Iliad, presented through the analysis of certain literary terms by Nnlist and de Jong; (9) an index of all occurrences of personal names, by Stoevesandt and others; and (10) a word index showing the contacts between Homeric and Mycenaean Greek, by Wachter. In this new account of battle scenes in the Iliad, Oliver Hellmann steers a middle course between those who would see the hoplite phalanx already reected in Homer (perhaps most prominently exemplied by Joachim Latacz) and those who (like Hans van Wees) see a mode of warfare preceding hoplite tactics, in which small groups of warriors ght in open formation. [...]one of the strengths of this book is its healthy skepticism about the notion of reading actual historical practices or conditions directly out of the Iliad.