Preface and Acknowledgments

The poems of Homer originate in Greek epic tradition, which goes back to the 2nd millennium bce. Somewhere in the Archaic Age they were fixed in writing, and since the 6th century bce began being recited at the prestigious Panathenaic festival, which was among the central events of the public life of Athens and of the whole of Greece. Even more importantly, they formed the basis of elementary education, to be memorized at schools all over the Greek world during two millennia, until the dissolution of Byzantium in the 15th century ce. This is why the history of the Homeric poems is not simply a his-tory of a literary text but that of a literary text highly privileged in the civilization to which it belonged.

The situation was different in the Latin West, where Vergil was universally read whereas Homer became a mere name. The modern reception of Homer started only in the 17th and 18th centuries, with the appearance of the first translations of the Homeric poems into European languages. But it was above all the radical change in the taste of the reading public effected by Romanticism that firmly established Homer’s position as one of the canonical authors of modernity. The Iliad and Odyssey have become an integral part of contemporary cultural experience, while adaptations of the Homeric poems in fiction, poetry, visual arts, theater, and film have made the story and the history of the Trojan War widely popular with audiences all over the world. In view of this lasting interest, it is sur-prising that no comprehensive reference work that would guide the readers of Homer, with or without Greek, through what was once defined by Eric Havelock as the “tribal encyclopedia” of ancient Greece, has been produced thus far. The Homer Encyclopedia is the first such reference work on Homer’s diction and artistry, the historical and cultural background of the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as Homeric scholarship and the reception of Homer in education, literature, and art from antiquity to the present. First and foremost, however, it is a gateway to the world of Homer.

Of the more than 1,300 alphabetically arranged entries that constitute this encyclope-dia, almost 900 address personal and geographical names, including those that are men-tioned only in passing in the Homeric poems. Alongside being informative in itself, the introduction of the bulk of minor and ostensibly inconsequential characters belonging to the latter category offers to the reader a highly illuminating prosopographical perspective of Homer’s world. A team of graduate students working under my supervision – Amit Baratz, Asaf Bartov, and Daphne Cohen, all of them from the Department of Classics of

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Tel Aviv University – did excellent work in preparing 416 shorter entries constituting this group. H. Ebeling’s Lexicon Homericum (1880–1885) served them as a database, and they were further aided by the Cambridge commentary on the Iliad (1985–1993) and the Oxford commentary on the Odyssey (1988–1992). All the entries belonging to this category go unsigned.

The entries that do not feature proper names encountered in Homer are arranged around two mains axes: (1) the diachronic, or historical, axis, addressing such topics as Greek epic tradition; the historical background of the Homeric poems; the history of the text of Homer; Homeric scholarship, ancient and modern; the history of the interpreta-tion of the Homeric poems and their reception in literature, philosophy, and art; and (2) the synchronic axis, or that of the Homeric text proper, which addresses Homer’s language, meter, style, and narrative; Homeric society, religion, and values; the view of poets and poetry, as well as various aspects of Homer’s world (see the Synopsis).

Each main category (except for those that are enclosed by square brackets) receives a separate long entry, which further directs the reader to more detailed treatments of the most important topics. For example, side by side with the overall characterization of Homer’s narrative, the entry “Narrative” directs the reader to such entries as Similes, Speeches, Reminiscences, Digressions, Paradigms, Parables, and Catalogues, and the entry “Society” to Law, Family, Women, Class, Exchange, Slavery, Warfare, Economy, and Household; the latter in their turn contain further references to still shorter units addres-sing more narrowly defined issues as well as realia and technical terms. All Greek terms in the names of the entries (e.g., oikos, thumos, hapax legomena) are transliterated.

My intention was to produce a Homer encyclopedia as polyphonic as the Homeric poems themselves are, being representative of different trends and opinions in the ever vibrant field of Homeric scholarship. One hundred and thirty-two contributors from all over the world, among them established authorities in the field as well as younger schol-ars, have taken part in the project, generously sharing their scholarly expertise and their enthusiasm for Homer. I would like to take this opportunity to express my deep gratitude to them all. I am especially indebted to Mark W. Edwards and Martin L. West for their help and advice at the initial stages of my work on this project. Maureen Alden, Oliver Dickinson, Mark W. Edwards, and Donald Lateiner have generously contributed approx-imately twice as much as their original shares, while Adrian Kelly, Andrea Rotstein, Ruth Scodel, and Martin L. West kindly agreed to accept certain last-minute assignments, thus making it possible to bring the project to completion at the planned time. I would also like to thank Al Bertrand and Haze Humbert for their help and support. My special thanks go to Galen Smith for her indispensable assistance over the past two years and to Brigitte Lee Messenger and her wonderful team of copy-editors for their devoted work over the project.

It is my pleasure to acknowledge that the first and probably the most significant stage of the work on The Homer Encyclopedia was carried out during my term as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (January–April 2007).

Margalit FinkelbergAugust 2010, Tel Aviv

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