![]() With pedagogical aims to the fore, the translation is ‘mostly literal’ (p. On balance, perhaps a clearer way of helping students to develop skills in textual criticism would be to guide them through a simplified apparatus along the lines of that in West’s Loeb. And I fear that, despite the undoubtedly good intentions behind such a presentation of the text, it is likely to prove confusing to students, who will need further guidance from their teacher on textual questions. On the other hand, the commentary’s references to simply ‘some MSS’ or ‘several MSS’ as the source of readings obscure both the complexity of the tradition and the principle that certain MSS are more likely to preserve better readings than others. On the one hand, this has the advantages of prompting students to reflect on the problems of establishing a text, to assess the merits of different readings and to highlight the ways in which the text was received and remodelled by different audiences (this being the rationale given on pp. These are not indicated by square brackets, even when the present editors conclude that they are most likely interpolated rather, one must turn to the discussion in the commentary to discover which lines have come under suspicion. Strikingly, Christensen and Robinson have included in the main text the majority of those lines that have usually been considered interpolations. This volume does not offer a critical edition, but rather an unadorned Greek text that is principally based on the editions of Allen and Ludwich (p. The section on formulaic language seems rather too detailed for the intended audience, but nonetheless makes clear how the treatment of formulaic material has been used by scholars as a means of determining that the poem is by a literate poet imitating the oral style. The question of the text’s date is picked up at various points in the commentary itself, which highlights those linguistic features that scholars have adduced as dating evidence. On the basis of the poem’s style and diction, Christensen and Robinson conclude that it is by an author who ‘worked in a center of Greek learning and culture, but lived in an increasingly “Roman” world’, and imply that the 1st century CE is its most likely date (pp. 5 Similarly, as part of the useful discussion of key features of the ancient parodic tradition, illustrative passages are provided from Hipponax and Hegemon. One feature of the introduction that will be especially helpful for students is the full text and translation of the two variants of the Aesopic ‘frog and mouse’ fable. 1-37) is divided into sections on: date and authorship the manuscript tradition ‘our poem’ the tradition of fable epic parody parodic epic Homeric language and meter formulaic language some conclusions about date and authorship a summary of epic divergences from Attic Greek and a brief note on the translation. ![]() They provide an introduction, bibliography, Greek text, English translation (in a separate section, rather than facing the Greek), commentary and glossary. They therefore aim their volume at readers unfamiliar with the poem and the traditions that influenced it, and suggest that their commentary is especially suitable for ‘intermediate and early-advanced reading of Greek’. ![]() x-xiii): their original plan was simply to produce a translation, but the questions they found themselves asking about the poem led them to create a commentary ‘for students setting out with just a bit of Greek to read something a little different’. xi), and the publication of a commentary in English will certainly help to excite wider interest in this fascinating and enjoyable survival of Homeric parody.Ĭhristensen and Robinson explain the genesis of their project (pp. 4 Christensen and Robinson write that their commentary ‘seeks to fill this void partially’ (p. 2 The result of this situation is that, although there are modern commentaries in German and Italian, 3 Anglophone undergraduates are most likely to be familiar with the poem only from M.L. 1 Such views of the poem as both insignificant and intractable meant that it was not until the 1980s that it began to be considered more seriously ‘as a complex and sophisticated text… rather than as a “subliterary” comic curio’. Allen described it as a ‘pusillum poemation’ and expressed some wonder at the considerable efforts expended by Ludwich on the text of a ‘miserum poema’ so afflicted with variant readings. Introducing the Batrachomyomachia in his Oxford text of Homer, T.W.
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