The Homer Multitext is an interdisciplinary project that has brought together researchers from a variety of fields in the humanities and computer science and from institutions across the United States and Europe. Mary Ebbott and I are the project’s coeditors, but we are partners in all aspects of the project with its information architects, Christopher Blackwell and Neel Smith. Douglas Frame, Leonard Muellner, and Gregory Nagy are associate editors and have been integral to the project since its inception. The Homer Multitext seeks to present the textual transmission of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey in a historical framework, one that takes into account that these poems were composed orally over the course of hundreds if not thousands of years by countless singers who composed in performance. When the tradition in which these songs were composed was flourishing, no two performances were ever exactly the same. Our historical sources still reflect such multiformity, which is natural and expected in an oral tradition, but scholarly editions in print typically obscure rather than highlight these natural variations. Using technology that takes advantage of the best available practices and open source standards that have been developed for digital publications, the web-based Homer Multitext offers free access to a library of texts and images and tools that allow readers to discover and engage with the dynamic nature of the Homeric tradition. The project publishes high-resolution images of the most ancient documents that transmit the Iliad (including five of the oldest medieval manuscripts that preserve the Iliad) together with edited transcriptions of their texts, including their accompanying scholia (marginal commentary derived from ancient scholarship on the poems). The project is generously supported by the University of Houston’s Research Computing Center and Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies, but we have also received crucial funding from a variety of sources, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.

It has been fairly customary practice in the long history of textual criticism of ancient works for editors to publish a book, or at the very least a lengthy introduction (in Latin), to set forth what the editor has accomplished and to defend his (until very recently, in almost every case, his) choices. That is not the purpose of this volume. These chapters represent a good deal of what I have learned in the course of thinking about why and how to make a Multitext edition of Homer and in editing the Venetus A with various teams of students and faculty, all of which took place, primarily in the summers, at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC. But rather than a congratulatory setting forth of what we have accomplished, I see this volume as being merely preliminary to the very necessary work that has only now become possible. As Matthew Jockers has written, “The literary scholar of the twenty-first century can no longer be content with anecdotal evidence, with random ‘things’ gathered from a few, even ‘representative,’ texts. We must strive to understand these things we find interesting in the context of everything else, including a mass of possibly ‘uninteresting’ texts” (Jockers 2013:8). The editors of the Homeric texts and scholia of past eras have made enormous contributions to our understanding of the Iliad and Odyssey and the ancient scholarship on those poems, but they were limited by the technologies of their day (primarily paper, ink, the printing press, and human learning, memory, and intellect). They could not test and verify their data sets or replicate their results. Their editions were selective, and their conclusions were necessarily speculative—as are mine in this book. The chapters I have written here provide the hypothesis—the “proposed explanation made on the basis of limited evidence as a starting point for further investigation” (Oxford English Dictionary)—that explains why my colleagues and I wanted to make a Homer Multitext. But the work of interpreting the Homeric epics multitextually has only just begun.