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 Institute 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 and vocabulary lists, or consult dictionaries, etc.  Having grown up with such time-and soul-devouring inconveniences, we thought this a particularly 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. We have provided a link to Benner's discussion of epic forms and also pointed to some key differences with what is found in the Batrachomyomachia.

Including a 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 and works through the commentary at the bottom of the page they should have before them in the translation, 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.  The 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 that the Batrachomyomachia  has an incredibly complex and frustrating textual tradition, which reasonably occupied our fellow Frogs and Mice scholars 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 relevant scholarship, insofar as they are both so intimately related.  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 textual criticism. 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, at the moment, is that 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, 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 in many instances might well be propaedeutic itself 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 to students here and there, and always in relation to opposing interpretations to which we have referred them 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 ). Gordon Kirkwood, our other, took Homer's influence on Greek tragedy as a matter of course and through the years published widely on these connections. On the Latin side one thinks of Stephen Hinds as doing the same, but from a different critical perspective.  In our view, however, there is unfortunately far too much rampant intertextuality posited 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 other 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, often perhaps sometimes shaking our heads at their unintended amateurism.  No one can shake their head at the kind of learning that is being assumed 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 not only in our view is 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 the poem these days makes utterly crude in comparison.  And does a poem qualify as parodic or “mock” merely because its characters are animals?  

 Thus, assertions that a particular passage in the Batrachomyomachia is an intertextual parody of a passage in Homer strike 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.

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