Professor Shipp's purpose in the first edition of this book (published
in 1953) was 'to examine in as much detail as possible the development
of the language of the Iliad in some of its typical features, with
careful attention to the spoken dialects involved and to the influence
of metre'. In the second edition he widens the scope of his work to
examine the Odyssey as well as the Iliad, and he extends its detail to
include syntax as well as grammatical forms and to cover questions of
vocabulary more comprehensively. The author's earlier conclusions are
shown to be confirmed, and an important further result for the Odyssey
has been to show the typical lateness of the language of moralizing
passages.