Have We
Homer's Iliad (Again)
by Prof. Steve Reece,
Saint Olaf College
Original text
© 2000 Steve Reece. All rights reserved.
Prefatory Remarks
In
the very fertile field of Homeric Studies there were published
in this, the last year of the 20th century, more than a dozen
new dissertations, two dozen new scholarly books and monographs,
and over 250 new articles and reviews in scholarly journals --
for a total of almost 10,000 pages of text. From the last decade
of the 20th century I have collected 2,200 titles of new books,
monographs, and journal articles -- a total of over 60,000 pages
of text. I estimate that in the last century around a half-million
new pages of scholarly text were printed (that's about 460 pages
for each page of Homeric text). And this has gone on year after
year for at least the last two centuries, and, though sometimes
with somewhat less enthusiasm, for twenty-four centuries before
that.
There
is a very present danger that we as Homeric scholars will fail
to keep up with all the new discoveries and insights in our field
as a whole. This is inevitable, and we recognize it. Some new
and even important discoveries in the field will pass many of
us by.
But
there is another danger, I think, more sinister than this one:
that the inundation of new material will cause us to drift away
from those moorings established by the toilsome research of our
predecessors; i.e., that we will forget what we have already
so painstakingly learned. I propose to offer to you today, not
something very new or particularly insightful, not something
more to add to the mass of material that you must master, but
simply a gentle reminder of something that I think we once knew,
or at least thought we knew.
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