SORTES HOMERICAE️

For most students, the Oxford Classical Text, or the OCT as it is commonly known, is the edition to buy. Not only is the binding sturdier, but the font (Porson) is very easy on the eyes.

And fortunately for those living in English speaking countries, the OCT of Homer can often be had cheaply: for between $15-$30 per volume and sometimes even less!

The only downside is the diminished critical apparatus compared to more the scholarly Teubner and Budé. But for our purposes (i.e., reading) this is more than adequate.

With respect to OCTs in particular, several of the recent editions are optical scans and not true reprints. For this reason I tend to prefer the older editions with the paper dust jackets and try to avoid the newer editions with laminate covers.

Abebooks is usually the better option but sometimes you'll get lucky on Amazon. For really good deals try searching for misspellings, etc. Pro-tips: (1) Sort by price from highest to lowest in order to find complete sets or multi-volume sales, and (2) filter by "Used" or "Hardcover" in order to avoid print-on-demand editions.

The Teubner editions seem once to have been the schoolboy editions used in the German Gymnasium. As a result is not uncommon to find old, somewhat worn, but perfectly legible copies for under $10.

I take that back about perfectly legible. The font can be excruciatingly harsh for our modern eyes, but for a student with antiquarian not to say Teutonic taste, the Teubner may be just the ticket!

More recent editions target a scholarly audience but may still be useful if you are looking for a copy of a text less frequently studied. The OCT may be the preferred reading edition for popular authors like Plato, Sophocles, etc., but without Teubner it would be next to impossible to find Plutarch's Lives and scientific works like the Elements of Euclid.

Facing Greek-English pages. The Loeb Classical Library is perhaps more than any other publishing endeavor responsible for popularizing the study of the classics.

With hundreds of volumes translated (and now re-translated), it is certainly possible to teach yourself Greek and Latin by means of these editions alone. Although that would not be my preference.

The font-face of the Greek is a little too large and a little too crowded to read for long stretches. And even when the facing English pages are not a distraction, frequently I find the translation misleading.

Nevertheless the Loebs make great editions for reading in English. The footnotes are genuinely helpful for the student and non-specialist alike. More: whenever you are confused or even merely curious, you can always just "check the Greek".

The Loebs are often an excellent choice for texts like Polybius' Histories or Plutarch's Moralia where scarcely another edition exists in English and where the difficulty of the Greek would often make the attempt to rely solely on the primary source an exercise in frustration.

Facing French-Greek pages. The Budé editions are known both for their scholarly exactitude and stylish translations into the vernacular. But unlike the Loebs, the Greek here takes the center stage, occupying the right page instead of the left.

The font used in the Budé has an Art Deco vibe, a throwback to the promise of a future which never arrived. If simultaneously with your efforts to learn Greek you also want to practice your French, the Belles Lettres editions are a great fit.

Unfortunately the paperback binding which makes the Budé so lovely and pleasant to hold does not make for a long-lasting addition to a home library. Books can be re-bound (or re-purchased), however. And as Classics departments shutter in universities across the United States we may see many hard-bound Budés come onto the market.

In the same way an adventurer will want a map, a student of Greek will want a lexicon (i.e., dictionary). And if you are embarking on a thorough study of Homer's rhapsody's you can do no better than to take Cunliffe's Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect along with you.

In assembling his lexicon Cunliffe has meticulously distinguished the various senses of the words which you'll encounter, and has cited their occurrences so thoroughly that the lexicon doubles as a miniature concordance. And, most usefully for beginners, he includes entries for irregular and rare word forms.

In order to arrive at these pleasures quickly, you will want this no-frills vocabulary list of every word which occurs more than 25 times in the Homeric corpus.

Memorize 10 words per day from Owen's Vocabularies and then firm up that memory with the help of your Cunliffe by reading the passages in which these words occur. You will be reading Greek by sight in under 6 months.

Finally, the gentleman who will serve as your first guide to the world of antiquity: Clyde Pharr. In this book Clyde has masterfully designed an introductory Greek textbook using only the text of Book I of Homer's Iliad.

The book is perfectly paced for a summer course. By the end of its 77 lessons you will have read the entirety of Book I and you will be ready to tackle the rest of Homer on your own, or, better, with a friend.