The Odyssey (Ancient Greek) (Greek Edition)

Couldn't help myself, I'm sorry.I bought this book along with a textbook on Homeric Greek (Homeric Greek: A Book for Beginners--very promising so far) because I'm trying to teach myself Ancient Greek. The book is of fine quality--every tenth line is numbered, and the text is generally clear, though the smooth breathing marks look more like acute accents than I'm used to, and I find that a bit confusing. The other reviewer was very displeased by the fact that many verses break onto a second line due to the two-column format. I don't find this to be such a big deal, and am not sure any of the obvious alternatives (many more pages in single-column format, or tiny text, or giant pages to fit two columns) would be better.I should note that I've only been studying Greek for a few weeks, and at this point am mostly limited to sounding out this text and recognizing a few words. I plan to return to it after I've worked my way through my textbook, and will update this review as needed if I spot anything else at that point.

In an effort to save paper, the verse is printed in two columns per page in which it does not fit, so that each line is broken (and thus probably uses the same amount of paper to print) and the words of one column run all the way into the border of the opposite, which makes for words like ἠδεἄλγε᾽ (line 12 ἠδε + line 34 ἄλγε᾽) right on the first page... I'm having enough trouble making my way through the Greek - no need to compound it with this edition!

It's perfect for studying Homer. If you're a novice, you really do need some type of critical apparatus. You'll find the kindle edition with Latin and English helpful, together with Rouse's open source English translation. But most of all use Alpheios open source online edition complete with hypertext grammar and dictionary.