This volume brings together contributions by 21 writers. In the variety of its contents, the amplitude of its coverage and the general excellence of its individual chapters, it is a volume to applaud and savour. Not the least of its merits is that contributors do not limit themselves to LSJ (i.e. the 9th edition) but, where appropriate, take in the earlier editions too, from the first to this last, as well as the abridgements and Supplements, so that we are able to see the evolution of the Lexicon over a period of a century and a half. Some also cast an eye, for purpose of comparison, on other modern Greek lexica, the Diccionario griego-español (DGE), F. Montanari's Vocabulario della lingua greca (GI), and its English version, The Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek (GE) (the ‘List of Abbreviations’ on p. xiii reverses the labels, calling the former GE and the latter GI), as well the Lexicographica Graeca of J. Chadwick, the sternest modern scourge of LSJ.
The chapters are organised under four headings, of which the first is ‘History and Constitution of the Lexicon’. Stray's ‘Liddell and Scott in Historical Context: Victorian Beginnings, Twentieth-Century Developments’ is an admirable opener, relating the birth of the Lexicon and the preoccupations of its editors to the intellectual/theological temper of Oxford in the 1830s and 1840s, to its German predecessor and to the rival native dictionaries, then proceeding to the controversial choice of English instead of Latin, pirated American editions and, of no less interest, some of the nuts and bolts of publishing operations, choice of fonts and paper, methods of typesetting, print runs and costs. M. Williamson, in ‘Dictionaries as Translations: English in the Lexicon’, shows how the style of English chosen by the first editors (Saxon or Germanic words in preference to Norman or Latinate) reflected contemporary stylistic ideals, shaped as these were by nationalistic bias. D. Butterfield, in ‘Latin in the Lexicon’, goes further into the reasons why the editors chose not to use Latin for the purpose of translation, and classifies the various purposes for which they did nevertheless use it, before it all but disappeared from LSJ. A. Coker, in ‘Obscenity: a Problem for the Lexicographer’, illustrates the changing ways and languages in which the Lexicon has dealt with the problem. In referring to ‘the famous phrase “the decent obscurity of a learned language”’, it was desirable to add a warning that Edward Gibbon did not qualify ‘obscurity’ with ‘decent’, as D. Bain showed in the article which she cites. J.T. Katz, in ‘Etymology and Etymologies in the Lexicon’, considers what LSJ did, failed to do and (given the state of contemporary knowledge) could not have done in this ever-shifting field. He also throws some light on the ‘fourth man’, Roderick McKenzie, who helped Henry Stuart Jones with the etymologies. The ‘third man’ himself flits in and out of the pages of this volume. It would have been good to have a unified account of him, answering some unanswered questions, such as why the editor's job was given to the man who was to become Camden Professor of Ancient History, how he combined it with his other activities and how he interacted with the numerous advisers whom he enlisted. Anyone who wonders why he appears sometimes as Stuart Jones, sometimes as Stuart-Jones – once in both versions in the same sentence – will find a clue to the answer at p. 82 n. 2.
The chapters in the second part, ‘Periods and Genres of Evidence’, have a narrower or more specialised focus. B. Vine, in ‘Incorporating New Evidence: Mycenaean Greek in the Revised Supplement’, shows that the Revised Supplement did a fair job of incorporating Mycenaean material, though it fell short of the ideal. T. Mackenzie, in ‘A Canonical Author: the Case of Hesiod’, argues that Hesiod has been hard done by – misplaced in order of chronology after the Hymns, his idiosyncratic usages neglected and differences from Homer overlooked. C. Rowe, in ‘Philosophy and Linguistic Authority: the Problem of Plato's Greek’, argues that the Lexicon has consistently misrepresented the place of Plato's Greek in the development of the language, partly through elevating it as a model for student composers of Attic prose, partly through failing to recognise the flexibility of his linguistic usages, and especially through treating some aspects of his vocabulary as more technical or ‘philosophical’ than they are. E. Craik, in ‘Medical Vocabulary, with Especial Reference to the Hippocratic Corpus’, examines the ways in which the Lexicon has presented, and often misrepresented, medical and especially Hippocratic language, and (arguing along somewhat similar lines to Rowe) warns of the danger of regarding literary and medical usage as separable items. P. James, in ‘The Greek of the New Testament’, surveys a range of material and topics which belies the modest title – developments in NT philology, the influences of other lexica, the personalities involved, the consequences of LSJ's decision to leave the Church Fathers, Christian poetry and Byzantine literature to G.W.H. Lampe's Patristic Greek Lexicon – and ends with a stern indictment of the Lexicon's handling of NT Greek (‘superficial, shoddy, and shambolic’, p. 180). M. Janse, in ‘The Ancient, the Medieval, and the Modern in a Greek–English Lexicon, or How to Get Your Daily “Bread” in Greek Any Day Through the Ages’, offers an entertaining account of the semantic and lexicographical fortunes of ψωμός, ἄρτος, σῖτος, their cognates and a few other cereal edibles, from Ancient through to Modern Greek. P. Probert, in ‘Greek Dialects in the Lexicon’, examines the rationale behind some aspects of the Lexicon's handling of dialects – what system governs its choice of headwords, whether it has a basic or default dialect, what it means by (and from where it derived) the term ‘common form’. E. Bracke, in ‘Between Cunning and Chaos: μῆτις’, explores the evolving treatment of μῆτις in the Lexicon's successive editions, the equivocal and shifting resonances of the word and of the terms used to translate it, ending with a critique of the structuralist approach of M. Detienne and J.-P. Vernant in Les ruses de l'intelligence: la métis des Grecs (1974).
The third part, ‘Methodology and Problems’, shifts from the descriptive to the prescriptive, to a search for new styles of dictionary-making. M. Clarke, in ‘Looking for Unity in a Dictionary: a Perspective from Prototype Theory’, envisages a lexicon in which entries are diagrams, with a semantic prototype at the centre, its ‘instantiations’ plotted around it, at varying distances, rather like the planets around the sun. D. Goldstein, in ‘Discourse Particles in LSJ: a Fresh Look at γε’, summarily chastises LSJ and DGE and even more summarily dismisses J.D. Denniston (‘woefully out of date’), before offering a lengthy new analysis of γε as a ‘scalar operator’. This chapter, wafting us deeper into the rarefied air and private language of theoretical linguistics, might have been more at home in a different volume. J. Clackson, in ‘LSJ and the Diachronic Taxonomy of the Greek Vocabulary’, treading more solid ground, discusses the developing uses of generic terms, such as ζῷον, and envisages a Historical Thesaurus of Greek that might track the ways in which Greek views of the natural world changed over time. M. Silk, in ‘Literary Lexicography: Aims and Principles’, discusses, with subtlety and sophistication, how to establish and record what is normal in a language and what is deviant from that norm, and throws in some further reflections on his brilliant coinage the ‘iconym’, a word pregnant with associations but no longer possessing a readily definable meaning.
The final part, ‘Comparisons in Time and Space’, opens with a short chapter by M. Meier-Brügger, ‘Lessons Learned During my Time at the Lexikon des frühgriechischen Epos’, who sketches the history and aims of the LfgrE and then points out certain deficiencies in LSJ's treatment of the words βαρύς, δοῦλος, ἑάφθη, ἕπομαι/ἕπω, στεῦται/στεῦτο, στρογγύλωμα and χερνῆτις. The late M.L. West, in ‘Diminishing Returns and New Challenges’, briefly describes his involvement with the two Supplements (that he was once paid ten shillings an hour for reading Nonnus’ Dionysiaca is priceless news) and then offers a specimen contribution to an imaginary ideal, a Poetic Lexicon of Classical Greek, embracing epic, elegy, iambus, lyric, philosophical poetry, drama and verse-inscriptions from pre-Alexandrian times. This specimen consists of entries for ἆ, αἰδοῖος, ἀίσσω and ἄτη, with information on etymology, forms, prosody, related words and much else, with every single occurrence listed, classified, translated, assigned its register and meaning and explained in its contexts. This is a tour de force, signed off with (I suspect) the tongue ever so slightly in the cheek (‘this is all I have done, and all I intend to do. My aim is only to give a glimpse of something that someone might aim at sometime in the future’ [p. 343] – an aim unrealisable, because only one man could ever realise it). A. Thompson, in the longest chapter in the volume, ‘Βάπτω: an Illustration of the State of our Ancient Greek Dictionaries’, illustrates the developing treatment of this verb in Liddell and Scott, LSJ, the Revised Supplement, then DGE, GI, GE and by Chadwick, relentlessly analyses their deficiencies, then offers her own treatment. This is a magisterial survey, which will demand the attention of all who write on this word in the future. The volume is rounded off with an engaging chapter by J. Considine, ‘Liddell and Scott and the Oxford English Dictionary’, who shows how the Lexicon influenced the style and methodology of the OED.
The editors have done a good job (not least in providing copious cross-references between contributions), though they have let in a fair number of typographical slips.
