 The two Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, which came into being by about the 8th century BC, were the absolute bedrock of Greek culture. Everybody who was a Greek speaker and quite a lot of people for whom Greek was actually a second language knew these things off by heart, took them all over the Greek world, all the way through from the period of colonisation in the 7th century BC to the fall of Constantinople in the 15th century. When the Great Library at Alexandria in Egypt was founded at the beginning of the 3rd century BC, a huge project was conceived of editing all the manuscripts of Homer, both the Iliad and the Odyssey, to produce the perfect text. And the first librarian at Alexandria, Zinodotus, was really the first great American scholar. Now the word scholar comes from the same root as the word scolion, which means a comment that you actually write on the text, on the papyrus, some sort of an interpretative remark or something to say, look at the grammar. And the three great Homeric scholars, there was Zinodotus, and then there was Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus, they between them actually created what they thought was going to be the canonical text. They wanted to have a single perfect text of Homer. The editors of the Homeric texts did several different things. They were delete lines they didn't like. They sometimes added them or moved them around. They also put a mark in the margin to show that there was some kind of question mark over it. They also added comments sometimes, interpretative comments or comments questioning why Homer had actually put a particular line in. Now we can actually get access to some of those all these centuries on through some manuscripts like the Townley, which is in the British Library, and that dates from the 11th century, but it's actually full of interpretative comments, some of which may go all the way back to the Alexandrian scholars. In the Latin West, through the whole period of the flourishing of Byzantium, actually Greek really got forgotten, and there were no people who could really read the Greek text of Homer at all. People knew vaguely what was in these poems because Roman authors talk about them quite a lot, and people knew that the Aeneid of Virgil had an awful lot of Homer in it. But it wasn't until the 14th century when the great humanist scholars, Petroc and Boccaccio, realised that they were never ever going to understand exactly what Homer was like until they found a real manuscript, and they actually managed to get some out of Constantinople, bring them to the West and have a scholar called Pilatus actually translate them into Latin. Now that didn't happen until quite late in the 14th century, but all of a sudden people could read the Iliad and the Odyssey in Latin, which they did understand. The Latin translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey were circulating from 1369 when Pilatus actually finished them. But it wasn't until the next century really that people started reading the Greek fluently and quite a lot of them. In fact, the Harley manuscript in the British Library dates from the middle of the 15th century, which is when the humanist Greeks were actually copying it out a lot so that an awful lot of manuscripts of Homer going around all of Western Europe from that point onwards. But the real breakthrough, of course, is the printing press. And in 1453, you know, you've got the fall of Byzantium, so all those Greek texts getting lost, but fortunately just enough has been sprung into the West to get printed in Italy at the humanist presses, and the first printed edition of Homer comes out in 1488 and Homer is saved for the world.