This commentary differs in a number of respects from traditional commentaries. The latter may be broadly defined as heterogeneous, problem-oriented, and micro-textual: they consist of philological, linguistic, literary, or historical notes on mostly small parts of the text which had been deemed difficult by previous commentators–a format which goes back to the historical forerunners of our commentaries, the lemmatic scholia. This narratological commentary covers the whole text, not only the problematic parts, deals exclusively with its narrative aspects, and includes a discussion of the macro-textual and meso-textual levels.

I use the term ‘narratological’ here in a broad sense. The word ‘narratology’ was coined in 1969 by Todorov, but the theoretical interest in narrative actually started much earlier, when novelists like Gustave Flaubert and Henry James set out to ‘defend’ their art by means of technical discussions. Next, it was the Russian formalists at the beginning of the twentieth century and the French structuralists of the nineteen-sixties who developed a set of refined tools to analyse narrative texts. When narratology was introduced into classical scholarship, one of the first texts to which it was applied was Homer, and this means that there exists a large body of narratological analysis of both the Iliad and the Odyssey. So much for narratology in the strict sense of the word. When dealing with the Homeric epics, however, there is much more. Through the ages Homeric scholarship has produced a wealth of information on narrative aspects of the poems.