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.