Over eighty years have passed since Walter Leaf's two-volume commentary on the Iliad appeared, and a replacement has long been needed. The present volume initiates a series of six which may or may not succeed in filling that need. Naturally one hopes that it will; but at the same time it is fair to emphasize that it is not, in any case, envisaged as ‘definitive’, any more than Leaf's great individual effort was. For how could there be a definitive commentary on a poem of such length, brilliance and complexity, one that is always open to being experienced in fresh ways? That idea of the definitive has occasionally damaged classical scholarship, and it is as well to concede without delay that many of the judgements to be made in these pages will inevitably be personal, inadequate and idiosyncratic. The intention, of course, is to make a commentary which provides most of what is needed by serious readers of this remarkable poem; but it is in the nature of the Iliad itself, and of the present still defective state of Homeric studies in general, that much will eventually require to be amended.

Homer, in any case, presents special problems. The critical literature is enormous, and has passed through historical phases some of which are best forgotten. The idea that the Iliad and Odyssey are in an important sense oral poetry, and that the formular systems revealed most fully by Milman Parry from 1928 onward result from that, has brought a degree of welcome relief, not only by demonstrating important new dimensions in criticism but also by rendering obsolete its polarization into ‘analytical’ and ‘Unitarian’.