In 2015, a certain Hollywood film notoriously claimed that you can get an original, first edition copy of the Iliad for “a buck at a garage sale.” After the film came out, large numbers of people around the world began searching for places where they could buy their own first edition copy of the Iliad. I decided to take a look into this issue. If you have ever wanted to own a first edition copy of the Iliad, here’s how to get one.
That unbelievably weird scene
In a bizarre and hysterical scene from the 2015 erotic horror film The Boy Next Door, written by Barbara Curry and directed by Rob Cohen, the character Noah, a creepy stalker played by Ryan Guzman, gives the character Claire, a high school English teacher played by Jennifer Lopez, an older-looking copy of the Iliad. Astonished by the gift, she enthusiastically opens the book and gasps, “Oh my God! This is… this is a first edition? I can’t accept this, it must have cost a fortune.” Noah replies, “It was a buck at a garage sale. One man’s trash…”
I will confess straightaway that I have not seen the whole film. Indeed, from what I’ve heard, it’s not exactly the kind of film I would be likely to enjoy. Nonetheless, I must admit that I have watched the “first edition of the Iliad” scene at least a dozen times just to laugh at how utterly and hilariously wrong it is. Here is a clip of the scene on YouTube:
After the film came out, many people apparently became very interested in buying their own first edition copy of the Iliad. According to the online bookseller AbeBooks, immediately after the film came out, “The Iliad, first edition” became the top search term on their website—ahead of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
As it turns out, though, strictly speaking, you can’t buy a “first edition” copy of the Iliad at all, because no true “first edition” of the work has ever existed. AbeBooks told The Guardian that they were, at that time, unable to “match the book seen in the movie to anything currently for sale on AbeBooks,” which is something of a hilarious understatement to those of us who know the real history of the textual transmission of the Iliad.
On a side note, the notorious “first edition of the Iliad” scene was actually not in Barbara Curry’s original script for the film. It was added by Rob Cohen, the director. Cohen explained why he included the scene in an interview, saying:
“I wanted [Noah] to have a reason to come see [Claire] when [her family] went on the camping trip. He had to find a reason and my reasoning was he went to a first edition bookstore, bought her the first edition, and told her it was from a garage sale so she wouldn’t be uncomfortable that he bought her an expensive gift. It gave them a chance to be together alone for the first time where if anything was going to happen, it could happen.”
Cohen also stated that he is a book collector and that he “know[s] about first editions.”
No true “first edition”
As I have discussed before (in this article from July 2019 for instance), the Homeric Epics are believed to have been originally composed in around the early seventh century BC or thereabouts. They were originally passed down through oral tradition. It is likely that many aiodoi (i.e. oral poets) contributed to the poems. With each performance, the poet would recompose the poem, improvising as he went, using stock phrases and epithets to fill out lines while he composed the next ones.
In other words, there never was a “first edition” of the Iliad in the strictest sense, since the poems were originally passed down orally—unless you consider some bard reciting the poem sometime around 2,750 years ago in Greek a “first edition.”
Ultimately, of course, the poems were written down eventually. It was widely believed in antiquity that the first complete written copies of the Homeric poems were produced in Athens in around the mid-to-late sixth century BC during the reign of the tyrant Peisistratos. For instance, the idea that the poems were written down during the reign of Peisistratos is referenced by the Roman orator Cicero (lived 106 – 43 BC), by the Greek geographer Strabon of Amaseia (lived 63 BC – c. 24 AD), by several ancient “Lives of Homer,” and by the Byzantine scholar Eustathios of Thessaloniki (lived c. 1115 – c. 1196 AD) in his Commentary on the Iliad.
Modern scholars disagree about whether or not there really was a “Peisistrean recension” of the Iliad and the Odyssey, but it is generally thought that the poems were probably first written down in their entireties in around the sixth century BC or thereabouts. Regardless of when or where the very first complete written version of the Iliad was transcribed, however, it certainly has not survived to the present day; whatever it was and whatever it looked like, it was certainly destroyed long, long ago.
ABOVE: A Reading from Homer, painted in 1885 by the English Academic painter Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema
The Iliad in writing
For much of classical Greek history, individual manuscripts of the Iliad and the Odyssey varied significantly from each other. There was no standard text of the poem and instead there were many different versions floating around. In around the third century BC, however, the scholars Zenodotos of Ephesos and Aristarchos of Samothrake, who both worked at the Library of Alexandria in Egypt, albeit a generation or so apart, produced the standard “Vulgate Iliad,” which became the basis for nearly all later manuscripts.
There are no complete manuscripts of the Iliad that have survived to the present day from antiquity. We do, however, have plenty of fragments of ancient copies of the Iliad that have survived. Some of the surviving fragments are more substantial than others; some are tiny and contain maybe only a few words; others contain substantial portions of the text.
Most of these surviving fragments of ancient manuscripts of the Iliad are written on papyrus and were found in Egypt. The hot, dry climate of Egypt is conducive to the survival of ancient texts; whereas the more temperate, rainier climates of European lands like Greece and Italy are far less conducive to the survival of ancient texts.
ABOVE: Photograph of Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 20, a fragment of papyrus discovered in the rubbish dump of the Greek city of Oxyrhynchos in Egypt, bearing text from Book Two of the Iliad
The earliest surviving complete manuscripts of the Iliad date to the late centuries of the first millennium AD and were copied by scribes in the Byzantine Empire. The best-known early complete manuscript of the Iliad is Venetus A, which was copied in around the tenth century AD by a Byzantine scribe, probably in Constantinople.
Venetus A includes the complete Greek text of the Iliad, as well as extensive commentary from various ancient and medieval scholars. Contrary to what some news agencies have reported, I am fairly sure that Venetus A is not known definitively to be the oldest complete manuscript of the Iliad; it is, however, the most famous due to its extensive commentaries, which include extensive and unique information about the other, now-lost poems of the Epic Cycle, which I wrote about in this article from July 2019.
Eventually, Venetus A wound up in the library of the Greek Renaissance scholar Vasilios Vessarion (lived 1403 – 1472), who donated it to the Republic of Venice in 1468 along with the rest of his personal library. The manuscript is currently held in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, Italy, where it is considered one of the most prized works in the entire collection.
You most definitely could not buy Venetus A or any other Byzantine manuscript of the Iliad like it “for a buck at a garage sale.” As I discussed in this article I published in November 2019, in 1998, the Archimedes Palimpsest, a similarly famous Byzantine manuscript, sold at auction for two million dollars. My guess is that Venetus A would sell for at least that much if it were ever sold. It is an extremely famous manuscript that provides us with utterly priceless information about the lost poems of the Epic Cycle and about Iliadic scholarship in antiquity and the Middle Ages.
ABOVE: Photograph of a page from Venetus A containing a portion of the text of the Iliad in Greek along with extensive commentary from various scholars
The first edition of the Iliad in print
Of course, while the earliest written version of the Iliad was certainly destroyed long ago and the earliest surviving complete manuscripts of the Iliad would probably cost millions of dollars if they were sold, there are copies of the first printed edition of the Iliad that are still in existence that are maybe a bit cheaper than Venetus A would be.
The movable type printing press was first invented in around 1040 AD in China, only around a hundred years after Venetus A was copied. Nonetheless, the movable type printing press was not introduced to Europe from China. Instead, the movable type printing press was invented in Europe independently by the German metalworker Johannes Gutenberg (lived c. 1400 – 1468) in Strasbourg in around 1439—around 2,100 years after the Iliad was first composed and around five hundred years after Venetus A was copied. Gutenberg’s invention of the moveable type printing press enabled classical texts, which had been copied exclusively painstakingly by hand for centuries, to finally be mass-produced for the first time in history.
The editio princeps, or first printed edition, of the Iliad was produced in Florence in 1488. It was edited by the Greek Renaissance scholar Dimitrios Chalkokondylis (lived 1423 – 1511) and printed by the Italian publisher Bernardus Nerlius. Chalkokondylis’s edition of the Iliad was part of a two-volume folio edition of the Greek texts of both the Iliad and the Odyssey titled “Ἡ τοῦ Ὁμήρου ποίησις ἅπασα” (“The Whole Works of Homer”). Here is a link to an online version of it.
You definitely cannot buy a copy of Chalkokondylis’s printed edition of the Iliad and the Odyssey for “a buck at a garage sale,” since copies are extremely rare and expensive. In 2012, a copy of Dimitris Chalkokondylis’s editio princeps of the Iliad and the Odyssey sold for US$158,500 at Christie’s. That’s a whole heck of a lot more expensive than “a buck at a garage sale.” Nevertheless, you might be able to find a copy of it at a rare books library somewhere out there, because copies of it do still exist.
ABOVE: Portrait from the late 1480s of the Greek Renaissance scholar Dimitrios Chalkokondylis, who produced the first printed edition of the Iliad and the Odyssey in Florence in 1488
The first complete edition of the Iliad in English
The first complete English translation of the Iliad was published in installments in 1598 by the English scholar and poet George Chapman (lived c. 1559 – 1634). Chapman’s translation, which is still available today, is a bit of an amusing curiosity to modern readers, since (much like Alexander Pope’s later translation) it is composed entirely in rhyming couplets. Chapman’s full translations of both the Iliad and the Odyssey were published as a single edition for the first time in 1616 titled The Whole Works of Homer.
There are still copies of the first printing of George Chapman’s translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey out there that you may be able to find in a rare books library somewhere, but you most definitely could not buy a first edition copy of George Chapman’s translation for “a buck at a garage sale.” You might be able to get a modern edition of his translation for that much, but not a first edition copy.
Right now, there is a 1634 edition of Chapman’s The Whole Works of Homer for sale on AbeBooks for $9,500. You could easily buy a car for that much! I imagine a copy from the very first printing in 1616 would cost even more than that. That should give you an impression of the kinds of costs we are dealing with here; a first edition copy of Chapman’s translation would be insanely expensive.
ABOVE: Portrait engraving of the English scholar and poet George Chapman from the frontispiece of his translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey titled The Whole Works of Homer, published in 1616
Maybe the first edition of a particular English translation? Nope, sorry!
Ok, the edition shown in the film is clearly not the first handwritten manuscript version of the Iliad from the late sixth century BC that was undoubtedly long ago destroyed, nor is it the first handwritten version of the standard “Vulgate Iliad” produced in the third century BC by the scholars at the Library of Alexandria that was also certainly long ago destroyed, nor is it Dimitrios Chakokondylis’s 1488 printed two-volume folio edition of the Iliad and the Odyssey in Ancient Greek, nor is it a first edition copy of George Chapman’s English translation The Whole Works of Homer from 1616.
Some people online have tried to exculpate The Boy Next Door by arguing that maybe the book in the film is a first edition of a particular English translation of the Iliad—not a “first edition” of the Iliad itself. Unfortunately, this argument also fails. The exact book that was used in the scene is an edition of Alexander Pope’s English translation of the Iliad with notes and introduction by Rev. Theodore Alois Buckley and illustrations by John Flaxman printed in 1884 by Belford, Clark & Co. Here is a link to a digitized version of the book on archive.org.
Alexander Pope’s translation of the Iliad was first published in six parts between 1715 and 1720. John Flaxman’s illustrations to the Iliad were first published in 1805. Buckley’s notes were first published in 1851. The first edition of the Iliad with Pope’s translation, Flaxman’s illustrations, and Buckley’s notes was published in 1853. The edition shown in the film, on the other hand, is from 1884. In other words, it is definitely a reprint. There is no sense at all in which it can possibly be considered a “first edition” of anything.
ABOVE: Screenshot of the front cover of the edition of the Iliad claimed in the film to be a ‘first edition.” It was, in fact, printed in 1884.
Conclusion
Strictly speaking, the “first edition” of the Iliad never existed and the first written version of the poem has not survived. Nonetheless, if you are willing to fork over a couple million dollars, you may be able to buy an early complete manuscript of the poem from the Byzantine period. For only $158,500, you might be able to buy a copy of the first printed edition of the Iliad and the Odyssey from 1488. For even cheaper still at only $9,500, you can buy a copy of an early printing of the first complete English translation of the Homeric poems.
Admittedly, these may be a bit outside the average person’s price range, but I bet, if you happen to be someone like Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos, $158,500 for a book is basically nothing.
