Homer in Print: A Catalogue of the Bibliotheca Homerica Langiana at the University of Chicago Library ed. by Glenn W. Most and Alice Schreyer (review)

As stated in its preface, this elegantly produced volume is the result of collaboration between the worlds of private collecting, philanthropy, research libraries, and scholarship. Its genesis was the Homer library (“Bibliotheca Homerica Langiana” [BHL]) formed by the bibliophile Michael C. Lang who, in 2006, presented his collection to the University of Chicago to stimulate research, discovery, and knowledge not only of Homer, but also of the bibliographic sciences.

Far from being a mere list of editions, which the word “catalogue” might lead some to expect, the volume contains considerably more detailed information than names of authors, titles, printers, and dates; each of the 175 entries is accompanied by informative commentaries, or brief essays, whose focus, as the editors state, is “on the transmission of the Homeric text and the printing, publishing, and editorial history and critical reception of the editions included rather than on the individual copies.” Thus, the work traces the transmission and reception of the Iliad and Odyssey in printed form from the editio princeps of 1488 to the first decade of the twenty-first century. The 175 entries are grouped into five main sections: A: Greek Editions; B: English Translations (by far the largest section, comprising 109 entries, including “Retellings for Children”); C: Translations in Other Languages; D: Scholarly Works; E: Illustrations, Facsimiles, & Manuscripts.

In section A, all significant Greek editions are included. This reviewer, however, found it puzzling that among the bibliographical references following the commentaries on the editions, the standard printers’ bibliographies are strangely omitted: for example, A. A. Renouard for the Aldine and Estienne editions (A2, A6, A14, A16) and A. Willems for Elzevier (A17). Section D deals with Homeric scholarship from the publication in 1521 of Didymus’ scholia (D1) and culminates in Milman Parry’s revolutionary 1928 Paris dissertation on traditional Homeric epithets that strengthened belief in the oral nature of the poems (D14).

In addition to the main entries there are three longer essays. The first consists of an introductory account by Lang on the genesis and formation of his collection, “The Architecture of Accumulation: A Book Collector’s Apology,” including an enlightening section on English translations of Homer. Lang states that although the Homeric poems have been translated into virtually all Western and several Eastern languages, more have appeared in English than any other: at least 105 complete English translations have appeared since Chapman’s. (As a side note Lang points out that over these last five centuries, “there is as yet no complete translation by a woman of the Iliad or Odyssey in English.”)

The other two essays, both dealing with aspects of Homer’s Nachleben, are found in appendix; in the first, titled “A Shaggy-dog Story: The Life, Death, and Afterlives of Odysseus’s Trusty Dog Argus,” the author, Glenn W. Most, has chosen this touching little episode of the Odyssey to illustrate the vaster history of the reception of Homer in the works of editors and translators through the centuries. The second, “Quarreling over Homer in France and England, 1711–1715,” is an account by David Wray of the battle waged in intellectual circles during the second decade of the eighteenth century known as the Querelle d’Homère, a revival of the culture war known as the “Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns.”

This volume elegantly fulfills both the editors’ and Lang’s stated objectives by contributing the first in-depth study of “Homer in print.”