Homer and the Homeric Hymns

I know of no Greek mythology textbook to rival Homer and the Homeric Hymns. Helaine Smith has dipped her net into Homer's epics and the Homeric Hymns and pulled out the stories, alive and flashing, fresh from the Greek, which Smith has translated with loving sensitivity. This book will teach students how to read, analyze, and write. It is a treasure. -- Rosanna Warren, professor of Humanities, Boston University; poet and critic
Homer and the Homeric Hymns is equally strong as a text for English composition, as an education in mythology, and as an introduction to Greek literature. Needless to say, there are few good books that achieve any one of these aims, and this text does all three with finesse and charm. -- Frank Nisetich, professor of Classics, Emeritus, University of Massachusetts
Homer and the Homeric Hymns is loaded with resources-glossaries, questions for discussion, analytical and creative exercises, writing models, and suggestions for supplementary reading. Each chapter is self-contained and can be studied individually, so the text can be used as both a close-at-hand resource for the swamped teacher and as a core text for teachers who are designing an entire semester's course of study. -- Mara Taylor-Heine, Chair, Upper School English Department, The Chapin School
Clear and challenging, Homer and the Homeric Hymns provides college students in freshman writing and survey classes with context, analytic glosses, and narrative bridges that link crucial and substantial passages from the poems, presenting them for special attention as though they were sets of diamonds on a long string of gems. -- John C. Briggs, University of California, Riverside