A Guide To...Classics

What is a Commentary?

Commentaries are designed to help both students and scholars of the classics work more effectively with ancient texts.  

Commentaries can take many different forms. Some commentaries are written as footnotes, under or around an edition of an ancient work. Others can be found at the back of the book containing an ancient text, or in a completely separate volume. You can find commentaries which walk you through an ancient text line-by-line, and others which take more of a narrative approach to describing important themes, characters or other ideas in a text. There are even ancient forms of commentaries found in manuscripts, known as scholia. 

Commentaries may also be very different in their focus. A commentary designed for students might provide translations or explanations for important vocabulary. Commentaries might also address topics related to the text such as word choice, grammar, literary devices, or meter; historical details; themes and ideas; manuscript sources for the text; and/or questions and problems that previous scholars have had about a certain part of the work. The ultimate goal of any commentary, though, is to help the reader to better understand and to engage more fully with, the ancient text. 

Why Use a Commentary?

If you are taking a Latin or Greek course, often your required textbooks will include some kind of commentary. But beyond assigned readings, it is often valuable to consult one (or more!) commentaries for a text that you are trying to read closely. A commentary will help you better understand what you are reading and ask questions about it. It will highlight important parts of the text which you should particularly pay attention to or ask questions about.  Commentaries are particularly useful if you are trying to compare different versions of the same text (or different versions of the same story told in multiple texts), or if you are doing a word study where you are looking at the use of specific Latin or Greek words. They can also be very helpful inspiration for reflection or research paper topics, or for other long-term projects! 

How Do I Find Commentaries? 

Most of the time, commentaries will be found with the texts they comment on. So, if you are looking for commentaries on the Odyssey, you should start by looking where the books on Homer are found (see this page for more information). Check multiple editions of the text in question to see if they contain commentaries, or look for separate commentary volumes in the same areas. There are also some useful collections of commentaries on the web, for example: