THIS Volume is the first of three that aim to provide an introduction and commentary to the Odyssey. It is a revised version, without text and translation, of the first two parts of the six-volume edition commissioned by the Fondazione Lorenzo Valla and published by Mondadori. In keeping with the Odyssey's wide geographical range this undertaking has involved Homerists of five nationalities, from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and it is hardly surprising if we have approached our task in different ways. Inevitably there is diversity of opinion and variation in emphasis; we do not think that, in principle, this lack of uniformity calls for apology, and, though we realize that at first it may seem disconcerting, we believe that a multifarious approach will in the end prove more stimulating than confusing. There has been no complete commentary in English on the Odyssey since WB Stanford's compendious edition, first published forty years ago; a fuller treatment seems intrinsically desirable, and the intervening years have, in any case, seen major developments in Homeric scholarship on many fronts. The Valla commentary was accompanied by the luxury of our own text, but economy and the convenience of the user, we decided, would be better served if the reader were to have the text of the Odyssey before him in a separate volume; the lemmata of the commentary have accordingly been taken from TW Allen's Oxford Classical Text (second edition, 1917), but this should not present any difficulty for anyone using a different edition.