For such a short and seemingly undemanding poem, the Batrachomyomachia has
enjoyed a rather remarkable literary history. We were thus both intrigued and slightly
hesitant when the editors at Paideia Press asked us if we would like to prepare an
open-access edition of the poem that would not only be “accessible” and “scholarly”,
but would also reflect the Paideia Institute’s commitment to the importance of spoken
Greek in language pedagogy. This last goal is something traditionally absent from
student texts, unless emphasized independently by their classroom teachers, and for
us to witness the kind of technical wizardry that has gone into this edition with regard
to the poem’s aural possibilities has not only been utterly amazing, but also greatly
heartening. At any moment while students are puzzling out a verse, they can
immediately access an expert recitation by our colleague David Starr. Indeed, a
chief goal of this edition is that by the time students have finished working their way
through the poem, they will be able to listen to (or even recite for themselves) the
whole poem with understanding and pleasure. To that end, by pointing in the notes
to various aural aspects of the poetry, we have tried to encourage them not only to
listen to each of the ongoing sections of the poem as they are translating, but also to
regularly go back over all the previous ones, thus honing their hexameter skills
through repetition while systematically building up to a complete reading of the
poem. By the same token, illustrations have always been important both in the text’s
accessibility and as a reflection of its scholarly standing. Accordingly, apart from
David’ Beck’s accompanying drawings, we have included a small historical selection
that depict the poem as everything from what Chapman called “the crowne of all
Homers workes” to childrens’ fairy tales, with the animals and gods portrayed in
various stages of anthropomorphism and theriomorphism respectively.
In order to aid the text’s ease of “accessibility,” the pages have been laid out in
such a way that students should have everything they need in front of them to
translate without having to flip or scroll through their texts for endnotes, glossaries,
vocabulary lists, dictionaries, etc. Having grown up with such time-and soul-
devouring inconveniences, we thought this a particuarly important element of
accessibility, especially for today’s students. The commentary in general is aimed at
the intermediate Greek level, though we have preferred to err on the side of giving
too much vocabulary and syntactic help rather than too little. We have also pointed
out epic forms whenever we have thought it might help to avoid confusion. This has
perhaps led us to occasionally repeat vocabulary in ways that some might find
unnecessary, but one of the things that we were surprised to discover is how often
the poet repeats vocabulary in the same line positions and how often repeated
vocabulary conveys slightly different nuances that can complicate and enrich one’s
understanding of the overall action of the poem.
Including a facing translation has, of course, its own history of storied pedagogical
controversy. We emphatically believe the claim often made by professors of Greek
that students are better off figuring out just one line on their own as opposed to
coming to class wonderfully prepared with the footsteps of a trot dimly heard in the
distance. The pages, whenever possible, have therefore been laid out in such a way
that if a student begins with the Greek on the left and works through the commentary
at the bottom of the page, by the time their eyes (and ears) make their way back up
to the translation on the right, they should have before them, rather than a crutch, a
model to help them check up on or, perhaps, polish their own efforts. So too, we
have tried to make the translation, often at the expense of idiomatic English, as close

as possible to what their own successful efforts should lead them to--again, so that
they need not waste time looking at outside translations, many of which are so
creative that one is often hard pressed to see their exact relation to the particular
details of the Greek. By the same token, if there are some bits of linguistic
knowledge we have wrongly assumed students to have, the translation should offer
fairly straightforwardly equivalents to help them construe correctly. And in any case,
including a translation is also a concession to the fact that many students feel the
need to rely on one anyway. They are more prone to do so, however, when they feel
they are struggling or getting nowhere with the Greek, which can be an occupational
hazard for intermediate courses on epic these days since students typically start with
Attic Greek. Moving directly to Homer often involves initial hours of drudgery with
various commentaries and lexicons trying to learn all the specialized vocabulary—we
both, for instance, still have our handy lists of hapaxes from our youth. As is well
known, Batrachomyomachia was for many centuries used as a school text and
certainly one of our goals is for students to work their way through this short text as
handily as possible so that they will be less intimidated on first looking into Homer’s
Homer. We have spent enough time with the text, though, not to view it as being only
purely instrumental, since it offers not just useful philological training, but also raises
a variety of questions about war, its causes, leadership, animals, the gods, and so
forth that are sufficiently compelling to engage one’s attention.
The mandate of offering an edition that is also scholarly was our greatest source of
worry in taking on the project, especially since, rather surprisingly, two excellent
commentaries in English have recently appeared in the space of a couple of years. 1
Thus, apart from the ease of using of our edition and its aural component, a word
about different and perhaps shared goals with these other works is perhaps in order.
It is hardly a secret to scholars that the Batrachomyomachia has an incredibly
complex and frustrating textual tradition. This reasonably occupied our fellow Frogs
and Mice lovers in their commentaries to various degrees, but such was not our
mandate. Yet at the same time, in intermediate courses students, especially those
studying Homeric epic, rarely, if ever, have the opportunity to confront textual
questions, especially the kind that individually can affect the interpretation of an
entire poem. So we thought it appropriate to include at least a brief separate section
at the end that takes up textual questions along with a few pointers to the resultant
scholarship, insofar as they are both so intimately related. This has necessitated
introducing some page flipping, and we have indicated by an asterix in the Greek
text where we have discussed textual problems. For the most part, many of these,
we imagine, are of more interest to those who want to have an initial taste of the
scholarly methods one uses in approaching them. If any of this inspires readers to
eventually find their way back to Ludwich (1896) so much the better, but we have not
put textual questions steadily at the center of students’ attention--only a few of the
most important or representative should they wish to engage with them.
More controversial is that, at the moment, the scholarly airwaves dealing with the
poem are dominated by two principal literary concerns, intertextuality and parody.
Both Christensen-Robinson and Hosty operate with the assumption that the poet of
the Batrachomyomachia is deeply imbricated in the two Homeric epics—the former
even entitling their edition The Homeric Battle of Frogs and Mice. This, of course,

1 J. P. Christensen and E. Robinson (2018). Matthew Hosty (2020).

has a venerable tradition, but their commentaries additionally reflect a newer
computer-driven approach that presents the poem as the work of an amazingly
learned poet continually attempting to make all-manner of intertextual connections to
Homer’s poems with “parodic” intent. Now, obviously, for intermediate students who
do not know the Homeric epics in the kind of--we would say superhuman--detail
needed to appreciate the nature of the connections such scholarship posits, a
commentary continually retailing such intertexts would be for them a rather Zen-like
exercise of being asked to appreciate the sound of one hand clapping. A similar
problem afflicts explanations of parody. It is hard to appreciate a parody without
knowing its source texts so that one is in on the joke. Moreover, since there are
typically no explicit linguistic connections between such posited intertexts, it is not
that contiually pointing out possible connections serves any particularly useful
pedagogical goals, at least linguistically. We have therefore limited ourselves to
referring occasionally in the textual notes to some of the most prominent scholarly
articles reflecting this approach, while typically offering bits of cautionary advice
about how to begin to assess what we see as both theoretically and empirically
problematic claims. But in any case, we believe it would be premature overall for
students to begin reading the poem in the light of its various arguable relations to
Homer and other poets, when in the first instance they are engaged in a task that is
itself propaedeutic to reading Homeric epic.
One might infer, however, that another motive for our not tying our comments more
to Homer was a distaste for much of the current intertextual scholarship on the
poem, and that we were trying to atavistically insulate the commentary and student
readers from perhaps the most prominent and mutually reinforcing currents of
today’s scholarship. For the record, we believe it is unseemly in a struggling field to
show distaste for the work of younger scholars who are trying their hands at new
techniques, and we certainly are old enough to have seen various methods tried,
diverse claims made about them, and then over the years watched them refined,
modified, forgotten, revived, extended, etc. But in any case, it is perhaps better to be
upfront about our views, even though we have thought it appropriate in such a work
to give only a few scattered glimpses of them here and there, and always in relation
to opposing interpretations to which we have referred readers so that they can get a
fuller picture and make up their own minds about our critical hesitations.
One of our teachers and a dedicatee of the volume, Pietro Pucci, was a pioneer in
studying the intertextuality between the Iliad and Odyssey and showed in brilliant
fashion intertextual links between the two epics based on common “quotational”
diction and formulae, rival and shared thematic concerns, and a deep understanding
of the meaning and point of these intertexts (Pucci, 1982 ). On the Latin side one
thinks of Stephen Hinds as doing the same, but from a different critical perspective.
In our view, there is unfortunately far too much rampant intertextuality these days of
the parturiunt montes game-boy variety, especially in connection to this poem. With
every click of the mouse, one seems able to conjure up in nearly every verse a cloud
of so-called intertexts based on a stray word, distant thematic resemblance, a bit of
Rorschachian inspiration, etc. These various intertexts, once noted, typically drift off
quickly into all sorts of divergent directions without any coherent or persisting goals.
As is well-known, intertextuality in general can tend to put pressure on the unities of
texts and their goals, but as often now practiced as a species of pure formalism, it
merely leaves behind heaps of unconnected and conflicting fragments. Moreover,
such techniques rely on a series of arguable assumptions that depend on positing a
text of such incredible learning that at any moment it embraces thousands of lines of

potential poetic intertexts. Clearly, no human reader or listener could ever possibly
call up references in this way from all over the Homeric corpus in rapid succession or
put them together as intertexts in the way they are often presented in such readings,
especially since they are grounded in supposed similarities that are neither explicitly
dictional or sufficiently fine-grained thematically. But even if in some possible world
an ideal reader could hold enough in their head and manage to freely associate
snippets of verses in such a manner, the larger question is, to what end? Typically
there seems to be no particular point to any of these putative intertexts beyond a
donnish wink of recognition and, perhaps, the resultant smug satisfaction of being let
in on an elite game—at least in those cases when one actually gets the reference
(though almost always one must be spoon-fed the intertexts by the intermediary of a
computer flitting around the epics, which should at least mute some of the self-
satisfaction).
When one reads Ulysses or Ezra Pound, for instance, one understands that one is
explicitly playing this kind of learned game with the author, and by the time we
mature as classical scholars we are likely to be far less impressed by their bits of
Greek and Latin learning, even perhaps sometimes shaking our heads at their
unintended amateurism. No one can shake their head at the kind of learning that is
being posited for the poet of our poem, however. The Homeric knowledge shared
and relayed between poet and reader that is required by this electronic style of
intertextual scholarship is not only, in our view, implausibly immense in its
combinatorial overreach, but it also posits vatic abilities on the part of a poet that
border on the absurd. It requires an ancient poet who was surrounded by a huge
array of ancient texts to also have nicely taken care in limiting their poem’s non-
Homeric intertextual links and winks to that tiny smidgen of Hellenistic poetry that
purely by chance has happened to survive for us. Clearly, such a poet would not only
have to have been uncannily prophetic, but perhaps even more important,
wonderfully considerate of today’s scholars and their looming REFs.
Similar issues arise for claims about parody or paroidia, a term woefully
undertheorized in the field of Classics as a method of composition, intimate
criticism, or as Bakhtin (1981) argued, as one of the most fundamental ways by
which literary cultures develop and evolve. Sadly, one still hears the
Batrachomyomachia characterized as a parody or mock epic that is a failure since it
is not funny--with no awareness on the part of such critics that parody plays an
important generative role in the most serious works of literature. Other common
assumptions—not only that parody always implies comedy of some sort or that it is
‘parasitic’, that it implies hostility towards its source text, that it can operate at any
level of detail in particular social contexts, etc.,—all these kinds of worries have
hardly begun to be sorted out with any precision in larger literary histories of the
Hellenistic period, much less this text. Indeed, it is completely unclear, for instance,
whether our poet even operated in the kinds of elite Alexandrian circles that could
allude to Homeric epic in ways that the putative intertextuality of this poem now
makes utterly crude in comparison. And does a poem qualify as parodic or “mock”
merely because its characters are animals?
Thus, when we hear the assertion that a particular passage in the
Batrachomyomachia is an intertextual parody of a passage in Homer, it strikes us as
being essentially empty if there are no precise and explicit dictional or thematic
connections, but only the vaguest of resemblances. Moreover, on their own, such
claims tell us little about the actual purpose of a passage or give any explanation of
how it serves in the poem’s composition. Nonetheless, we are not such stuffed

shirts that we are not prepared to believe that this line of research might signal a
potentially important first step in the right direction. But it is not one that intermediate
Greek students need to take. However exciting and promising we may all have found
such computational techniques fifty years ago when they were first introduced into
Classics, we fear that today’s students are far too technologically savvy to be much
impressed by such heavy-handed applications. Thus, we have tried to focus their
attention not on technologically contingent approaches, but on the timeless skills of
reading, reciting, and thinking about a text carefully in its own right, and to help them
acquire the linguistic skills, both textual and aural, required to do so.