Iliad 10 and the Poetics of Ambush

Book excerpt: The tenth book of the Iliad has been doubted, ignored, and even scorned in Homeric scholarship. Using established methods for interpreting oral traditional poetry, however, Due and Ebbott illuminate many of the interpretive questions that strictly literary approaches find unsolvable, and they demonstrate how the episode shares in the oral traditional nature of the whole epic, even though its poetics are specific to its nocturnal ambush plot. True to their multitextual approach to the text, Due and Ebbott have included a series of critical texts of Iliad 10, including the tenth-century Venetus A manuscript and select papyri, and discuss these individual witnesses and the variations they offer. The essays and commentary explore Iliad 10 within the larger contexts of Homeric epic and the epic tradition. --Book Jacket.