Acknowledgements

We are grateful to R.J. Barnes, Alan Fishbone, David Starr, Christos Tsagalis, and Dylan Baldwin for carefully reading through the entire manuscript and offering scores of helpful suggestions, corrections, and doubts, and to an anonymous referee who mostly had the latter, which we hope have at least led to some clarifications in our presentation of divergent scholarly approaches. For helpful advice on various points, we are grateful to Fred Ahl, Caroline Alexander, Andrew Ford, Alex Forte, Gwenda-lin Grewal, David Konstan, Pietro Pucci, and David Sider. Jason Pedicone, Marco Romani, and the entire Paideia staff have been a dream to work with and we would also like to thank them for connecting us to David Beck whose visual imagination and painstaking research into the history of illustrations of the Batrachomyomachia not only are on wonderful display throughout the volume, but also influenced our own understanding of the visual dimensions of the poem. Finally, Dylan Baldwin, Matt Neuburg and Dave Turowec provided invaluable assistance in bringing the digital edition of this commentary to fruition.