Pulleyn has given us a useful commentary, ‘aimed at anyone from advanced students in the upper forms of schools through undergraduates and on to professional scholars’, hoping ‘that there is something here for people at all levels’ (p. ix; cf. p. vii). Not quite a onestop shop, but a book that casts such a wide net runs the risk of providing too much for some and too little for others. Does Pulleyn succeed in juggling the needs of his diverse readerships? With an eye to this journal's audience, I will focus on its utility in teaching.Footnote ¹

The book consists of a sizeable introduction (pp. 1–60), followed by text (based on the editions of Allen, von der Mühll, Van Thiel, and Martin West with a much-simplified apparatus: cf. 44) and translation (61-89), commentary (91-235), bibliography (237-259), glossary (261-282), index of technical terms (283-286), index (287-294), and index verborum (295-298). The introduction is a serviceable and often compelling entry point into the realms of Homeric epic, the Homeric question, and many niceties of Homeric language and metre. With sections on ‘the appeal of the Odyssey’, ‘structure’, ‘style’, ‘the world of the Odyssey’, ‘origins’, ‘transmission’, ‘metre’, ‘dialect and grammar’ it could double as a general introduction to the Odyssey, which is facilitated by Pulleyn's careful cross-referencing of relevant passages in the Iliad and Odyssey in the commentary. This is the commentary's greatest strength, which, however, makes the omission of an index locorum lamentable.

Pulleyn's book could make for standalone reading: a university student encountering the Odyssey for the first time should be able to peruse it profitably, particularly with the convenient and complete glossary and overview of termini technici. However, I think the sheer size, along with discussions of etymology and comparative linguistics (the index verborum lists parallels from Mycenaean Greek, Proto-Indo-European, Vedic, Avestan, Hittite, Old Church Slavonic, Old Irish, and Latin) disqualifies the book from use in high schools. Many pupils will find the bulk of notes too overwhelming and the contents needlessly frustrating (ix: Pulleyn laudably prefers not to ‘patronize’ his readers, but why force students to sift through pages of material they cannot yet understand?). That said, Pulleyn's love of Homeric language and narrative shines through on every page and is as alluring as the Sirens’ song. In this sense, the commentary does what it says on the tin (blurb: ‘focusing on philological and linguistic issues’). I would not hesitate to set Pulleyn's book as a textbook for an introductory Homer course at university-level, but this is not to say that I do not have any quibbles about the presentation of Pulleyn's argument or Homeric scholarship at large. I turn to these now.

A brief comparison may be instructive. The commentary itself pays tribute to its bigger brother, the lemmatic commentary by Stephanie West (in: A. Heubeck, S. West & J.B. Hainsworth, A Commentary on Homer's Odyssey: Introduction and Books I-VIII. Oxford, 1988). Pulleyn was also able to consult, for instance, Irene de Jong's A Narratological Commentary on the Odyssey (Cambridge, 2001) and Martin West's The Making of the Odyssey (Oxford, 2014), whose last chapter offers an analytical commentary (of sorts) on the poem's composition, and had recourse to the older commentaries of e.g. Ameis-Hentze and Stanford. How does the book under review measure up?

Pulleyn seldom disagrees with Stephanie West, but has original things to say, particularly in unpacking the rhetoric of book 1's speakers (e.g. ad 43 by Telemachus; 190, 196, 206 by Athena-Mentes). The linguistic aid provided by Stanford and Ameis-Hentze needs some expansion for the modern student, which Pulleyn happily supplies (but resisting the impulse to provide a full grammar, as Stanford does). He is alive to the grand architectural plan of the poem, happily signalling ring-compositions and allusions to later events or the storyworld of the Iliad. The work of De Jong and others thus is put to good use. While Martin West's influence looms large, Pulleyn does not follow his views on the poem's authorship: for West, the Iliad was written (sic) not by ‘Homer’, but rather by an anonymous poet (referred to as ‘P’), whereas the Odyssey was produced by a different poet (‘Q’). These views are summarily dismissed (40), as is Gregory Nagy's version of the oral composition theory – curiously styled as ‘extreme’ or ‘minority’ (40) – namely a Homeric multi-text (other publications on the matter, such as Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond. New York, 1996 or Homeric Responses. Austin, TX, 2003, are ignored, as is The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry. Baltimore, MD, 1980¹; rev. 1999).

Pulleyn's bibliography is eclectic, sometimes idiosyncratic. Since he is invested in both the nature and the allusive and structural significance of formulae, one might expect engagement with A. Hoekstra's Homeric Modifications of Formulaic Prototypes (Amsterdam, 1965) or J.B. Hainsworth's The Flexibility of the Homeric Formula (Oxford, 1968). The same holds for wider thematic resonance (e.g. P. Pucci's Odysseus Polutropos: Intertextual Readings in the Odyssey and the Iliad (Ithaca, NY, 1987). Other notable absences include S. Said, Homer and the Odyssey (Oxford, 2011) and reference works such as the Homer Encyclopedia (particularly useful for newcomers), Lexicon iconographicum mythologiae classicae (1981–2009), and Thesaurus cultus et rituum antiquorum (2004–2014). These remarks concern (predominantly) Anglophone bibliography; foreign-language bibliography is even more sparse: no Detienne, Kullmann, Schadewaldt, Vidal-Naquet, etc.

Elsewhere Pulleyn knocks down a strawman: see e.g. on φωνήσας (142 ad 122), where A. Rijksbaron (The Syntax and Semantics of the Verb in Classical Greek [Amsterdam, 2002], 122–123) is cited as though claiming that an aorist participle ‘indicates relative time [sc. rather than aspect], marking an action as anterior to the main verb’, which Pulleyn by recourse to Chantraine and others deems ‘deceptive’. With these scholars, however, Rijksbaron (2002, 125; cf. now The Cambridge Grammar of Classical Greek [Cambridge, 2019], 608–609 and 629, co-edited by Rijksbaron) presumably would categorise this participle as a ‘modifier of manner’ (‘the participle, while expressing a completed state of affairs, is not anterior to the verb, but coincides with it’).

The minimalistic (and sometimes one-sided) representation of the Stand der Forschung is one thing – undergraduates might not need a full or even entirely up-to-date bibliography (though promised on the blurb) – but wider reading must be encouraged. Quips about the allusive poetics of later epicists whose imitations of Homeric formulae ‘are more like window-dressing rather than an integrated part of the fabric of their work’ (37) gloss over decades of work on intertextuality (which gave rise to the concept of oral ‘interformularity’ to which Pulleyn does not seem opposed) and needlessly diminish their beauty, while bon mots about literary theory underplay its value (e.g. 39: needless to say, Roland Barthes was aware – as are his readers – that his essay ‘The Death of the Author’ does ‘not mean that there was literally no such thing as an author’). At best, these are lame jokes; at worst, they risk turning students away from tools and texts that might aid their appreciation of literature, including the Odyssey itself, undermining Pulleyn's self-appointed goal (e.g. viii, x).

The project had been abandoned ‘for some years’ (x). How long is not stated, but this may explain the occasional (but not every) bibliographical omission, but probably not references to the Tomb Raider: Underworld videogame of 2008 (3 with n.30) or the Western Unforgiven (1992). I doubt whether any current student, in high school or at university, is aware of these mainstays of modern culture, and so instead of familiarising the Odyssey to contemporary young folk, these references may be alienating.Footnote ² The hiatus might account for other infelicities in the book: others have pointed out small slips in the translation; I noted some further trip-ups which I hope can be corrected upon the next impression.Footnote ³

Lest this review ends on a more negative tone than it began, let me reiterate: anyone teaching Odyssey 1 will find the commentary a valuable companion. Students might use the book to read tracts of book 1 by themselves, but should be given supplementary reading to offset imbalances. While the book (inevitably) does not serve its readerships equally well, this scholar came away with new insights, and for that Pullyn is to be thanked.