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WEST, M.L., The Making of the Odyssey. Oxford University Press, 2017. 1st paperback ed. XI,315p. Paperback. 'An Honorary Fellow of All Souls, Martin West was appointed to the Order of Merit in 2013, a high and richly deserved honour for perhaps the most brilliant and productive Greek scholar of his generation. The Homeric epics have always been a favourite stamping ground of his, and here with his usual formidable confidence, acuity and mastery of detail he marshals all the evidence at his disposal to conclude that the Odyssey (whose poet he calls ‘Q’) was not composed by the same poet as the Iliad, though Q certainly knew the Iliad; that it was composed somewhere in the Western Mediterranean (perhaps Euboea or Attica) around 630 BC as a rival to the Iliad (but surely someone would have know the poet’s name at that late date?); and that it is possible to discern various earlier versions of the poem on which Q constructed his own supreme effort. (...) This is a marvellous book by a superb scholar at the height of his powers. It rests on the assumption that the problems in the Odyssey arise not from interpolation but from the faults of the author. Whether it will wholly lay to rest the ghost of Denys Page, whose utterly persuasive and unmatchably witty The Homeric Odyssey (1955) introduced many of us to the joys of Homeric multiple authorship, remains to be seen.' (PETER JONES in Classics for All 07.04.2015). € 34.00 (New) ISBN: 9780198810193