Homer: Iliad Book VI

Description

The sixth book of the Iliad includes some of the most memorable and best-loved episodes in the whole poem: it holds meaning and interest for many different people, not just students of ancient Greek. Book 6 describes how Glaukos and Diomedes, though fighting on opposite sides, recognise an ancient bond of hospitality and exchange gifts on the battlefield. It then follows Hector as he enters the city of Troy and meets the most important people in his life: his mother, Helen and Paris, and finally his wife and baby son. It is above all through the loving and fraught encounter between Hector and Andromache that Homer exposes the horror of war. This edition is suitable for undergraduates at all levels, and students in the upper forms of schools. The Introduction requires no knowledge of Greek and is intended for all readers interested in Homer.

Barbara Graziosi is Senior Lecturer in Classics at Durham University. She is the author of Inventing Homer: The Early Reception of Epic (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and The Gods of Olympus: A History (2014), and has edited Homer in the Twentieth Century: Between World Literature and the Western Canon (2007) together with Emily Greenwood, and The Oxford Handbook of Hellenic Studies (2009) together with George Boys-Stones and Phiroze Vasunia. Johannes Haubold is Leverhulme Senior Lecturer in Greek Literature at Durham University, and director of the Centre for the Study of the Ancient Mediterranean and the Near East. He is the author of Homer's People: Epic Poetry and Social Formation (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and Greece and Mesopotamia: Dialogues in Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and has edited Plato and Hesiod (2010) together with George Boys-Stones. With Barbara Graziosi he has written articles on Homer and Greek lyric poetry, and Homer: The Resonance of Epic (2005).