The kind of scholarship which entails a thorough and unprejudiced study of a work of literature in all its aspects was not one of antiquity's strongest points. Yet Hellenistic Alexandria produced one such scholar of undoubted genius – Aristarchus of Samothrace, head of the Library there in the first half of the second century B.C. He worked on several authors, but it was his editions of and commentaries on the Iliad and Odyssey that were his highest achievement. Much of the critical work on the Iliad in recent times has been rendered obsolete and can reasonably be passed by in silence; neglecting Aristarchus is another matter, for reasons already outlined on pp. xxiiif. Not only is he an influential part of the history of the poems and their transmission, but his opinions on literally hundreds of problems arising out of the text deserve serious consideration. It is the main purpose of this short chapter to indicate how he worked, and in particular how his ideas have been reconstructed from the medieval scholia, an unusually complicated matter.

The earlier stages of transmission of the text of the Iliad are a subject for speculation; for a fuller account see e.g. my The Songs of Homer, ch. 14. The Homerids of Khios have already been mentioned (pp. 2f); they are one factor in the oral transmission of the epic down to the time of its first full recording in writing, which may have coincided with the making of an official text, for the purpose of controlling rhapsodic competitions in the Panathenaia at Athens, at some time during the sixth century B.C.