(Translating) the Scholia to the Iliad

Bill Beck joins me in the Lesche to discuss his new translation of the vetera scholia to Iliad Book 1-2: The Ancient Scholia to Homer's Iliad: A Translation, Volume 1 (Cambridge 2025). The book is the first in a series dedicated to translation of the Iliadic scholia.

For an episode on the Iliad itself, and its translation, see Lesche episode 1.6, "Translating the Iliad, with Emily Wilson" (by far the most popular Lesche episode ever!).

Ancient works

• Homer's Iliad (and Odyssey)
• The various scholia traditions
• "Mythographus Homericus"

Modern bibliography & references

• Dickey, E. 2007. Ancient Greek scholarship: A Guide to Finding, Reading, and Understanding Scholia, Commentaries, Lexica, and Grammatical Treatises, from their Beginnings to the Byzantine Period. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Erbse, H. 1969-1988. Scholia Graeca in Homeri Iliadem (Scholia vetera). Berlin: de Gruyter.
• Nünlist, R. 2011. The Ancient Critic at Work: Terms and Concepts of Literary Criticism in Greek Scholia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• van Thiel, H. 2014. Scholia D in Iliadem. Cologne: Universitäts- und Stadtbibliothek.
• Wolf, F. A. 1795. Prolegomena to Study of Homer. See Anthony Grafton's 2016 translation (the original is in Latin), published by Princeton University Press.

About our guest

Bill Beck is an Assistant Professor of Classical Studies at Indiana University. His research focuses on Archaic Greek epic and ancient Homeric scholarship. He is the co-editor of The Ancient Scholia to Homer’s Iliad: Exegesis and Interpretation (Oxford, 2021) and the author of The Ancient Scholia to Homer’s Iliad: A Translation, Volume 1 (Cambridge, 2025). He is currently completing a monograph on the Iliad’s representation of the first nine years of the Trojan War, provisionally entitled Ten Years in Troy, Fifty-One Days at Ilios: The Iliad and the Trojan War.

N.B. The podcast Bill recommends at the end of the episode is called Totalus Rankium.

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Thanks for joining us in the Lesche!

Podcast art: Daniel Blanco
Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius

This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study.

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