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The Cambridge Companion to Homer, and: The Printed Homer: A 3000 Year Publishing and Translation History of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and: The Homeric Hymns: A Translation, with Introduction and Notes (review)

Whoever devised the term ‘companion’ to characterize a book-length, non-specialist guide to a particular area of knowledge clearly hit on a winning formula. More enduring than an introduction, less mundanely functional than a handbook, and more comprehensive than a casebook or a collection of essays, a Companion promises the congenial fellowship and guidance of a friend constantly at one’s side for the duration of one’s exploration of a subject. The original ‘Companions’ were the alphabetically organized reference books, on subjects ranging from Music and English Literature to Food, Wine, The Law, and Sport, published by Oxford University Press. The series is still very much in business, and has recently been extended to encompass a number of excellent volumes devoted to specific authors and musical composers. The ‘Companions’ currently being published by Cambridge University Press and Blackwell preserve the label (implicitly trading on some of the expectations which it generates) but are, in fact, rather different in conception and design from the Oxford volumes. The Cambridge Companions to Literature, 130 in number at the last count, are exclusively focused on particular literary topics (periods, themes, and individual authors) and on phases in cultural history. They consist of a series of discursive chapters rather than alphabetical reference-entries, and attempt, in the words of the editor of the Companion to Homer, ‘both to provide essential advice for the novice and to suggest future directions for research’. Despite their shared brief and uniform format, individual Cambridge Companions interpret their remit in notably different ways. One of the best, for example, Jill Kraye’s Companion to Renaissance Humanism, has a cultural sweep and density of documen-