POLLUX' ENCYCLOPAEDISM

That is not to say that correct language use was unimportant for Pollux, just that it was less crucial as a priority for him than for some of his contemporaries. The Greek literature of this period was fascinated by the challenge of creative imitation of the classical past. Greek orators and authors prided themselves on their ability to reproduce the Attic language of fifth- and fourth-century Athens, although there was also a considerable amount of debate about the appropriate degree of archaism, and there are many texts from this period that criticize hyperatticism.Footnote ⁴ There is a considerable body of lexicographical material surviving from this period, much of it explicitly concerned with contrasting acceptable and unacceptable vocabulary. Important examples include the Selection of Attic Verbs and Nouns by Phrynichus,Footnote ⁵ and the Atticist of Moeris.Footnote ⁶ Clearly this is an important context for Pollux. As for those other authors, the vast majority of the words he recommends are classical Attic words, and in some cases (especially in Book 10, discussed further below) he cites specific classical authors by name as examples. It is also striking, however, that he is only a moderate atticizer by comparison with some of his lexicographical counterparts, and more willing to let in post-classical vocabulary, as we shall see further below.Footnote ⁷

However, it is also the structure of Pollux’ work that sets him apart from those atticizing contemporaries. He organizes his material thematically rather than alphabetically, as Moeris does (Phrynichus' Selection for the most part has no clear ordering principle, thematic, alphabetical or otherwise). And although Pollux too is clearly interested in presenting us with words one might use, unlike Moeris and Phrynichus he offers no explicit contrast (or very rarely) between acceptable and unacceptable words. Without that kind of contrast it is easy, as one reads, to lose sight of the fact that the text is recommending particular usages, and to feel instead that Pollux’ main priority is rather the inventory of material he presents us with and the image of human culture that material collectively conjures up, especially if we read consecutively, seeing the links and cross-references between successive sections of the text, and the fleeting impressions of narrative interconnectedness which lie beneath its sometimes disorderly surface. In order to understand that effect we need to turn for context not so much to the Roman Empire's other lexicographical texts but instead to the miscellanist and encyclopaedic writing which survives in such large quantities from this period. The rest of this section deals with those two categories in turn (as far as they can be separated from each other).

The ancient miscellany is not a clearly bounded genre. Nevertheless, many modern scholars have found it a useful term to describe the many texts from the Imperial period, which offer unsystematic collections of facts or anecdotes. One of the key features of many texts of this type is the fact that they are structured around a tension between order and disorder. Repeatedly they use the language of variety and variegation to describe their own practice, so much so that it often seems to be intended as a marker of membership of a wider body of texts united by that aesthetic principle. More specifically, the prefaces of these texts often include claims that the author has organized his or her material at random or as it has come to mind. That claim stretches back to Plato, Ap. 17b-c, where Socrates promises that his audience will hear things ‘spoken at random, with the words that come to mind’ (εἰκῇ λεγόμενα τοῖς ἐπιτυχοῦσιν ὀνόμασιν), in contrast with the ornate and carefully ordered speeches of his accusers. In the Imperial period it was adopted as a marker of the miscellanist tradition in particular. Often, however, that claim turns out on closer inspection to be rather disingenuous and many of these texts in fact have clusters of order scattered through them that become apparent only when we read consecutively and carefully. Plutarch, for example, claims in the preface to Book 2 of the Quaestiones Conuiuales that the text ‘has been written up in a scattered way and not in any distinct order, but instead as each topic occurred to my memory’ (σποράδην δ’ ἀναγέγραπται καὶ οὐ διακεκριμένως ἀλλ’ ὡς ἕκαστον εἰς μνήμην ἦλθεν, 2.pr, 629d). In practice, however, we often find recurring themes between successive chapters, which between them offer an image of the wider interconnectedness that a cumulative reading of the text can give us, as it encourages us to share Plutarch's own philosophical worldview and philosophical techniques of argument.Footnote ⁸ There are many other examples. Aulus Gellius, in Attic Nights preface 2–3, tells us that he has used a ‘chance order of material’ (ordine rerum fortuito), and that the final work has the ‘same variety’ (disparilitas) as his original notes.Footnote ⁹ Clement of Alexandria, in Stromateis 6.1.2, says that ‘the form of my Stromateis is variegated like a meadow, with things which come to mind haphazardly, and which have not been cleansed either in their order or in their expression, but instead are scattered in a purposely mixed fashion’ (τοῖς δ̓ ὡς ἔτυχεν ἐπὶ μνήμην ἐλθοῦσι καὶ μήτε τῇ τάξει μήτε τῇ ϕράσει διακεκαθαρμένοις, διεσπαρμένοις δὲ ἐπίτηδες ἀναμίξ, ἡ τῶν Στρωματέων ἡμῖν ὑποτύπωσις λϵιμῶνος δίκην πεποίκιλται). Photius, in his ninth-century Bibliotheca (cod. 175), tells us, of Pamphile's lost miscellany from the reign of Nero, that she wrote up her topics ‘at random and as each thing occurred, not that she thought it difficult to classify according to subject, but because she thought that the mixture and the variety would be more pleasant and agreeable than uniformity’ (ἀλλ’ οὕτως εἰκῇ καὶ ὡς ἕκαστον ἐπῆλθεν ἀναγράψαι, ὡς οὐχὶ χαλεπὸν ἔχουσα, φησί, τὸ κατ’ εἶδος αὐτὰ διελεῖν, ἐπιτερπέστερον δὲ καὶ χαριέστερον τὸ ἀναμεμιγμένον καὶ τὴν ποικιλίαν τοῦ μονοειδοῦς). The same motif also occurs in the preface to Photius' own text, which is hard to define generically, but which seems to be self-identifying with the miscellany tradition through that link with Pamphile's prefatory language, where he explains that his summaries will be written up ‘in whatever order my memory presents each of them’ (ὡς ἂν ἑκάστην αὐτῶν ἡ μνήμη προβάλοι). Another intriguing example is Pliny's Letters. Pliny claims in his opening letter (1.1) that ‘I have now assembled them without maintaining chronological sequence, for I was not compiling a history, but as each happened to come to hand’ (collegi non seruato temporis ordine—neque enim historiam componebam, sed ut quaeque in manus uenerat). It has become increasingly clear in recent years that that claim, just like Plutarch's, is a disingenuous one, and that individual books and successive letters are often carefully unified by common themes despite an initial impression of disparateness. That distinctive way of structuring the Letters, with its striking combination of surface variegation and underlying order, has usually been seen as something Pliny has learned from Latin poetry-collections,Footnote ¹⁰ but it seems possible that Pliny is influenced too by the Greek miscellanist tradition, and that he uses this claim about random composition to signal his close relationship with that tradition, given the frequency of claims about random composition in the other texts I have just listed.

Pollux uses precisely the same motif in the opening preface of Book 1: ‘For it was not easy to bring together everything into a single book. I will make my beginning from the place which is most fitting for pious people, that is from the gods. But other things I will arrange as each comes to mind’ (οὐδὲ γὰρ ἦν ῥᾴδιον ἑνὶ βιβλίῳ πάντα συλλαβεῖν. ποιήσομαι δὲ τὴν ἀρχὴν ἀφ' ὧν μάλιστα προσήκει τοὺς εὐσεβεῖς, ἀπὸ τῶν θεῶν· τὰ δ' ἄλλα ὡς ἂν ἕκαστον ἐπέλθῃ τάξομεν). For Pollux too the claim about disorderly composition is a disingenuous one.Footnote ¹¹ Sometimes the structure of individual books of the Onomasticon is very hard to perceive. But there are also many patches of order even within the less clearly structured sections of the text: for example, places where we see the same themes recurring again and again in slightly different forms within the same book, or places where we might suspect that juxtaposition between successive blocks of words is significant even when that is not made explicit. Obviously we need to be cautious not to put too much weight on specific passages in identifying that kind of effect, given the difficulty of reconstructing the text exactly in its original form. Nevertheless, there is enough consistency in the techniques of transition and thematic cross-fertilization within the reconstructed text to make it hard to doubt that Pollux intends us as we read to gain a sense of unstated connections and contrasts between different parts of the cultural universe. The examples I offer below should make that clear. His use of the image of composing as the material comes to mind is a way of signalling right from the start that he is aware of the miscellanist tradition he is working in, and a way of signalling the importance of the Onomasticon's equivocation between order and randomness for his conception of the work.

Pollux also draws heavily on encyclopaedic modes of compilation which were similarly widespread within Imperial literature. Ancient encyclopaedic writing is even harder to confine within clear-cut generic boundaries, and there is a risk of anachronistically retrojecting post-Enlightenment images of the encyclopaedia on to ancient texts. Nevertheless, it is clear that many ancient compilatory texts had in common ideals of comprehensive coverage, and that the idea of encyclopaedism can be useful shorthand for that shared rhetoric.Footnote ¹² Miscellanist texts too can have encyclopaedic characteristics, by the way in which they hint at universally significant educational principles underlying their disparate surfaces.Footnote ¹³ Nevertheless, the ancient texts most often referred to as encyclopaedic in modern scholarship often display a more explicit use of the rhetoric of totality and exhaustiveness, and also a more blatantly comprehensive and methodical structure, which usually aims at systematic coverage either of the whole of the natural world, as in Pliny the Elder's Natural History, or of all the branches of human knowledge, as in the tradition derived from Varro, and continued by Celsus, of dealing with different intellectual disciplines in turn in successive books or chapters. The latter strand in particular is closely relevant to Pollux, given that he is repeatedly interested in examining vocabulary associated with different kinds of expertise (as we shall see further below, especially for his treatment of the liberal arts in Book 4). More generally speaking, it is hard to avoid the impression that Pollux is aiming at exhaustive coverage of all possible areas of human life through his untiring attempts to map out a range of relevant vocabulary even for the most trivial of activities. That is not to say that the whole effect is necessarily tightly orchestrated to a fixed plan right from the beginning: the dominant impression, instead, is of an improvisational text which feels its way towards a vision of totality, rather than mapping it out explicitly from the beginning. Particularly important in that respect is his repeated use of cross-reference, which signals the fact that certain areas have been dealt with already in earlier books, and which implies that the cumulative end-point of his method will be to cover everything by filling in the gaps until there are none left (even if that comprehensive mapping of human experience is always a fantasy for the future, an image of what this method could make possible, rather than something he can claim to have accomplished already).Footnote ¹⁴

It is important to stress that this comprehensive character is not unique to Pollux within ancient scholarly traditions of writing about words. There are plenty of examples of non-surviving lexicographical works from third-century-b.c. Alexandria and afterwards, which clearly arranged their words thematically,Footnote ¹⁵ and many of which were clearly used by Pollux as sources.Footnote ¹⁶ For example, the thematic arrangement of Callimachus' work Local Terms seems to have been a key influence over the later development of the onomasticon tradition Pollux is working with.Footnote ¹⁷ Much of our evidence for those Hellenistic scholarly procedures comes from Athenaeus' great miscellanist work, the Deipnosophists, which contains within it many sections where material is ordered thematically, often with lengthy quotations from earlier authors: lists of different types of culinary and sympotic vocabulary, for example.Footnote ¹⁸ The thing that makes Athenaeus stand out is the way in which these lists are set within an imagined framework of conversation, in a way which allows us to see standard procedures of scholarly compilation in action—albeit in implausibly hypererudite form—and to see something of the appeal of collecting clusters of old worlds within an elite culture where guardianship and reactivation of the knowledge of the past were so highly valued.Footnote ¹⁹ We also have surviving word lists within the ‘glossary’ tradition, which are often aimed at language learners, and move systematically through different areas of useful vocabulary.Footnote ²⁰ Many of them, for example, move from morning to evening, in a way that is closely reminiscent of the structure of the central sections of Onomasticon Book 10, discussed further below.Footnote ²¹ But none of the surviving works by Pollux’ predecessors or contemporaries comes even close to the thematic complexity and exhaustiveness of the Onomasticon.

The broad resemblances between the Onomasticon and other encyclopaedic texts have often been noted—in fact the Onomasticon has sometimes been described as the first encyclopaedia in the European traditionFootnote ²² —but they have to my knowledge never been explored in depth. What I want to emphasize here is the way in which Pollux’ text, like other encyclopaedic attempts to map out the universe of knowledge, not only accumulates words and things, but also projects powerful images of their significance and their relative value. That insight is informed by other recent scholarship on ancient encyclopaedic writing (and indeed encyclopaedic writing in other periods). It has become increasingly clear that a text like Pliny's Natural History, far from being an inert and artless collection of discrete facts, is in fact underpinned by deeply rooted ideological assumptions about what is to be valued most in human culture and in the natural world, and about how different parts of the universe of human knowledge interconnect with each other.Footnote ²³ Isidore's Etymologies is another obvious example. Like Pollux’ work, it is heavily influenced by lexicographical and encyclopaedic traditions (although Isidore is also following a tradition of Stoic etymologizing writing which Pollux shows no great interest in).Footnote ²⁴ The text is divided into 20 books, covering in turn grammar, rhetoric and dialectic, mathematics, medicine, law, time, sacred books, God and the angels, the church, languages, letters of the alphabets, parts of the body, animals, the world and its parts, buildings, minerals, farming, war, games, more buildings, clothes and domestic objects. John Henderson has shown recently how Isidore's text, which was arguably the single most influential non-scriptural book of the Middle Ages, offers its readers ‘a panoramic presentation of the terminology from which the world was construed and constructed, and hence a compelling attempt to systematize the conceptual archive of Roman memory’.Footnote ²⁵ In the process he draws on recent scholarship on modern compilation, particularly on the ideological assumptions lying behind the word lists of Roget's Thesaurus.Footnote ²⁶ Recent work on Pollux has begun, in a rather piecemeal way, to make similar arguments for the Onomasticon,Footnote ²⁷ but that view of the text has never been subject to extended analysis.

POLLUX AND THE HISTORY OF ANCIENT ATHLETICS

The test case I explore in what follows is Pollux’ representation of athletic training and athletic festivals. Study of the athletic culture of the ancient world has undergone a great expansion within the last couple of decades, founded on close attention to the very rich body of surviving sources—in art, literature and epigraphy—for the Hellenistic and Roman periods in particular. However, the Onomasticon's evidence for ancient sport has been almost entirely neglected (the only obvious exception is Michael Poliakoff's work on the vocabulary of Greek combat sports, which includes regular citation of Pollux among other sources).Footnote ²⁸ My other main aim in this article is therefore to fill that gap.

The first point to make is that Pollux' image of athletic practice is very much a classicizing vision, focussing on roles and practices and objects that were current in the classical Greek texts he spent most of his time reading.Footnote ²⁹ In particular, he tends to sideline some of the more professionalized aspects of athletic training and competition that were so widespread in the Imperial world. That conclusion in itself is not surprising: Pollux’ preference for classical vocabulary is broadly typical of what we find in other contemporary lexicography, and indeed in many other kinds of elite text from the same period. What is particularly striking, however, is the fact that his neglect of Hellenistic/Imperial athletic culture is not completely even. As we shall see further below, he does allow a considerable amount of space to the phenomena of festival-funding and victory, which were such a prominent part of the civic culture of the Greek East in the Roman Empire, even if he admits post-classical terms only quite rarely. By contrast, he sidelines athletic training, whose development into a complex body of quasi-medical expertise was largely a post-classical phenomenon.

In doing so he is implicitly engaging with contemporary debates over scientific expertise and authority. The value of athletic training and the validity of the athletic trainer's claims to expertise were subjects of considerable disagreement within a range of other Imperial texts.Footnote ³⁰ The art of γυμναστική (athletic training) had been equated with preventative medicine or regimen generally—using techniques such as diet and massage as well as exercise—from the fifth century b.c. onwards. Plato and the writers of the Hippocratic corpus expressed some scepticism about the value of the trainers' knowledge, and many other later writers followed that lead. Galen, for example, attacks the athletic trainers as one of his main targets, representing them as impostors who attempt to lay claim to knowledge of the human body despite their ignorance.Footnote ³¹ It is also clear, however, that there were a number of important and influential treatises on the role of exercise within regimen. Galen himself writes at length on that subject, in a way that is meant to outdo the offerings of the athletic trainers, in his De sanitate tuenda, which is—in some respects—the most important surviving evidence for these techniques. Philostratus, writing a little after Pollux, is more unequivocal in his support for the science of γυμναστική: he offers an innovative defence of athletic training as a valuable body of expertise, ranking it together with other prestigious technai, and stressing its complexity and sophistication.Footnote ³² In that sense Pollux’ dismissive attitude towards training represents a response to contemporary cultural polemic (even if it is a casual response, rather than an effect he orchestrates carefully and elaborately). And the Onomasticon offers valuable evidence not just for the fairly unsurprising claim that some still looked back to the athletics of classical Athens as fantasy images against which to measure the athletic practices of their own society, but also more specifically for the prevalence of the dismissive attitude to trainers that Galen espouses so vehemently.

BOOK 3

Book 3 is one of those books where it is hard at first sight to discern an overarching structure. However, a closer reading, from beginning to end, reveals some striking repeated themes and preoccupations. The book opens with a long section on different words connected with family—first close family and parentage, and then extended family—stretching right up to 3.50. At 3.51 Pollux broadens his focus still further by moving on to words for citizens and then various types of relationship and hospitality between communities. At 3.61 we encounter more general words for friends and enemies, which shade into words for political favour of different types, and then in turn to various words for benefaction (including the word γυμνασιαρχῶν) in 3.67. Pollux’ word-association game thus takes us from personal, family relationships to political relationships, and if one reads consecutively it is hard to avoid the sense that these terms are all somehow significantly related to each other. In 3.68 we then switch to words for love in a way which compounds this sense of the links between the personal and the political; then to words for masters and slaves at 3.73; and then from there, via manumission, to various words for money and banking and loans, at 3.84, and more generally for abundance (money and buying and selling are one of Pollux’ recurring fascinations throughout the work as a whole). Once again Pollux seems to be offering us an image of human culture, where words connected with family and personal intimacy are significantly associated with words for very status-conscious, financially determined or politically consequential relationships. It is as if Pollux is conjuring up (although never explicitly or unequivocally, and perhaps in ways he is not entirely self-conscious about) a vision of a world where personal relationships are never far removed from an awareness of money and social hierarchy.

In the second half of Book 3, that shadowy sense of coherence is largely lost from view. We suddenly switch to a discussion of various words for sitting and walking and roads and then pleasure and then tombs and then rivers and then illness; then back to various words for wealth and poverty at 3.109, including more words for generosity and benefaction; then words for furniture and words for eagerness; then more vocabulary from buying and selling, yet again, at 3.124; then among other things danger and cowardice, accusations and negative judgements.

Then suddenly for no obvious reason we find ourselves at the beginning of a section on athletic culture, which is the final section of the book, at 3.140. It opens as follows: ἀγωνοθέται, ἀθλοθέται, ἀγώνων διαθέται, ἄθλων ἐπιμεληταί, ἔφοροι, προστάται, ἐπίσκοποι, ἐπόπται. In the light of what has gone before, we might suspect that this transition is an attempt to reactivate not just the earlier topic of benefaction but also, more generally speaking, the theme of relationships that are determined by status and by money. In the context of the rest of the book, in other words, it is perhaps not surprising that the place where Pollux chooses to begin this final section on athletics is the area of athletic culture which is most clearly linked with financial and political factors. The benefactor is represented here as a figure with political influence and high status. For example, one of the striking things about the list just quoted is the fact that many of the terms Pollux presents us with here are not actually paralleled in other ancient literature in relation to festival benefaction and festival organization. It is as if Pollux is more interested in thinking of acceptable or possible circumlocutions than in collecting specialist vocabulary.Footnote ³³ For example, the phrase ἀγώνων διαθέται is not paralleled elsewhere. The same goes for the phrases ἄθλων ἐπιμεληταίFootnote ³⁴ or (soon after the passage quoted) ἆθλα ἐφορᾶν. The words ἔφοροι, προστάται, ἐπίσκοποι, ἐπόπται do not occur in any other surviving Greek text in an agonistic festival context. The implication is that the office of the agonothete is typical of positions of responsibility, which were common right across Greek political and religious culture. That effect is strengthened by the fact that there is some close overlap between the vocabulary Pollux uses here, and what we find in other sections of the work on non-athletic benefactors and presiding officers. For example, three of these words are used again at Onomasticon 8.84, which includes the triplet ἔφορον ἐπόπτην ἐπίσκοπον in a section of vocabulary linked with ruling and authority.Footnote ³⁵ Later in 3.140 we come across ἄρχειν, καὶ πρυτανεύειν τὰ περὶ τοὺς ἀγῶνας. Again, there are not—to my knowledge—any parallels for the word πρυτανεύειν being used for the actions of an agonothete. One of its functions here is clearly to equate the agonothete with other kinds of political office-holder. As we shall see, this image of the prestige of the office of the agonothete stands in contrast with a much more dismissive portrayal of the status of the athletic trainer.

From there, we follow the progress of an imaginary festival from beginning to end. Pollux gives a generally positive vision of agonistic festival activity. 3.141-5 contains words linked with competition: first a list of words derived from the ἀγών root, in 3.141; then a list of words for different kinds of contest, words for the sacred festival truce and for venues for competition, all in 3.142; words for prizes and competitors in 3.143-4; judges and umpires, and also crowns in 3.145. Up to this point athletic and musical vocabulary has been listed together, with just occasional examples of a word which is appropriate for one but not the other, but now, at 3.146, Pollux makes it clear that he is going to hold back musical vocabulary for a later discussion (see further on that below), and he launches into a list of words associated with particular events, surveying the different athletic disciplines in turn. 3.152 lists words associated with victory: here the athlete is being rewarded for victory as it were after the events are over. We have travelled, then, from the financial investment and organizational oversight of the agonothete in 3.140, as the figure that sets this whole process in motion, through the contests themselves to the victory ceremony and the final conclusion. The final words of Book 3 return to that conceit—after a brief interlude devoted to words for training in the gymnasium, on which more in a moment—at the end, in 3.155: ‘the games are over, and let this be the end of the book’ (‘λῦτο δ' ἀγών’, καὶ ἔστω τέλος τοῦ βιβλίου).

This long account of the institutions of victory and prize-giving, like the section on benefaction discussed above, gives us an ideal opportunity to compare Pollux’ choices with contemporary usage, specifically with the large body of technical athletic vocabulary which was used within the flourishing festival culture of the Roman Empire,Footnote ³⁶ surviving from many thousands of agonistic inscriptions in the Roman period, and much of which is not used in classical writing on the subject.Footnote ³⁷ What we find is that Pollux for the most part ignores the technical jargon of the athletic festival calendar. However, there are some exceptions, in line with the flexible Atticism that characterizes his work as a whole, so that we do come away from these paragraphs with at least a glimpse of the flourishing and prestigious world of Imperial agonistic culture. To take one example, Pollux’ first word at the beginning of 3.140—ἀγωνοθέτης—had been rejected by Moeris, in favour of Pollux’ second word, ἀθλοθέτης, as insufficiently Attic. There are classical precedents for the use of ἀγωνοθέτης for a festival organizer, but the vast majority of surviving uses are post-classical—it becomes a very common word in Hellenistic and Imperial inscriptions. And Pollux’ decision to include it in such a prominent position here may be intended to remind us that he is interested in the athletics of the contemporary world, even if the majority of his words are archaizing or non-technical.

There is another striking example at 3.153, where he classifies the different types of festival as follows: τοὺς μὲν οὖν καλουμένους ἱεροὺς ἀγῶνας, ὧν τὰ ἆθλα ἐν στεφάνῳ μόνῳ, στεφανίτας ἐκάλεσαν καὶ φυλλίνας, τοὺς δ’ ὀνομαζομένους θεματικοὺς ἀργυρίτας. While we obviously cannot rule out the possibility of epitomization here, it certainly seems to be the case that Pollux is declining the opportunity, in this very brief treatment, to give a full inventory of the many different possible terms for different kinds of festivals from his contemporary world as they appear in the epigraphical record.Footnote ³⁸ An inventory of that kind might include words like χρηματίτης, εἰσάκτιος, εἰσελαστικός, οἰκουμενικός, ἰσολύμπιος, ταλαντιαῖος or other technical words used to describe particular categories of victor, for example περιοδονίκηςFootnote ³⁹ or Ὀλυμπιονίκης or πλειστονίκης or ἱερονίκης or παραδοξονίκης. All those terms, and many others like them, are scattered through the epigraphic texts of the Roman Empire, bearing witness to the complexity and bureaucratization of the agonistic festival calendar, which on most estimates probably had between 500 and 1,000 regular agonistic festivals by around a.d. 200. Pollux (or at least Pollux’ text as it appears in Bethe's reconstruction, shaped as it is by the additions and deletions of later editors) ignores them. Nevertheless, the basic distinction he draws here between sacred games which had wreaths as prizes and less prestigious games with money prizes is one which is very prominent in Imperial athletic sources, and much less so in the classical period, where the number of agonistic festivals was so much smaller. And the contemporary post-classical language of festival categorization is present in one very prominent case in his use of the word θεματικούς: that word is very widespread in Imperial inscriptions, but has no parallels in classical Attic Greek.

Pollux’ representations of benefaction, contest and prize-giving are thus marked to some extent by contemporary preoccupations, and occasionally admit contemporary vocabulary, even if for the most part the text clothes its inventory of agonistic words in classicizing garb. But other areas of Imperial athletic culture—institutions and practices which were Hellenistic inventions or later, and which therefore have no classical vocabulary—are almost completely lost from view. The most striking examples are associated with the gymnasium. For example, there is almost no reference anywhere in the work to the institution of the ephēbeia,Footnote ⁴⁰ which was primarily a post-classical institution, or to the various terms which were used to identify particular age-categories for athletic training and competition—words such as ἔφηβος, νέος or νεανίσκος—oddly so, given Pollux’ interest in stages of life elsewhere. But it is Pollux’ treatment of athletic training in the final paragraphs of the book where that kind of sidelining of the sophisticated contemporary culture of athletics is perhaps most obvious of all. Here the very positive vision of the agonothete as a figure of control and authority, and Pollux’ subsequent stress on the prestige of victory, are implicitly contrasted with a much more modest image of the expertise of the athletic trainer. He makes no acknowledgement of the rich body of writing on the techniques and principles of athletic training from the Hellenistic and Roman periods, with its own complex physiological vocabulary, and confines himself to just a few commonplace and rather cursory words and phrases.

The section on training starts in 3.153 as follows:

It is important to stress that this cluster of words is not straightforwardly dismissive of athletic training. The technē of γυμναστική is mentioned prominently, along with the oiling which was viewed as important for health, among other things because of the way in which it could help to maintain the correct balance of the humours.Footnote ⁴¹ But the passage is strikingly brief, and the word ἀναγκοφαγῆσαι, which stands in such a prominent position at the beginning of 3.153, and which refers to the practice of forced eating, risks having negative connotations, since it is treated very scathingly as one of the things which are bad about athletic training practices among others by Aristotle and by Galen.Footnote ⁴²

Lower down, at 3.153-4, we then see the trainer himself making an appearance, along with a range of other relatively low-ranking athletic officials.Footnote ⁴³ First of all come the μαστιγονόμος and the ῥαβδοῦχος and the μαστιγοφόρος, all of whom were officials charged with keeping order at festivals. Then we hear that ὁ ἐφεστηκὼς παιδοτρίβης τε καὶ γυμναστής, ἀφ' οὗ καὶ συγγυμναστὴς παρὰ Πλάτωνι καὶ παρὰ Ξενοφῶντι προγυμναστής· ὁ δ' ἀλείπτης ἀδόκιμον. Once again Pollux’ preference is for classical terminology: not only does he reject the word ἀλείπτης (which does occur in Aristotle, but is mainly post-classical), but he also ignores completely the most common word for trainer in Imperial Greek, especially common in inscriptions, that is ἐπιστάτης.Footnote ⁴⁴ That mention of the trainer is then followed by a brief list of gymnasium equipment, and also in that connection, in 3.154, the παῖδα ληκυθοφόρον, i.e. the slave who carries the oil-bottle around. The trainer is here in low-status company. It is important to stress again that this passage is not actively denigratory of the athletic trainer. The mention of the slave is separated from the mention of the trainer himself by four or five lines, and one might see it as significant that the slave is listed together with lots of inanimate objects, as if he is to be categorized as part of the gymnasium equipment that is under the trainer's control. The whip-carriers too are not straightforwardly menial figures: in some festivals at least they seem to have been viewed as significant appointments, especially at Olympia, where the μαστιγοφόροι or ῥαβδοῦχοι were appointed by the festival organizer.Footnote ⁴⁵ Nevertheless, it is clear that we have moved a long way from the authoritative presence of the agonothete in 3.140.

It is also striking that Pollux’ treatment of the art of the trainer—even though it is mentioned—is exceptionally cursory. There is no sign anywhere in the Onomasticon of the more intellectually ambitious, more medicalized version of γυμναστική, details of which could very easily have been juxtaposed with all the other words for training at the end of Book 3, or even in the section on medicine at the end of Book 4.Footnote ⁴⁶ What we have instead is a half-hearted list of the words used by the trainer to give instruction in wrestling technique. It was commonplace in the tradition back as far as Plato and Aristotle to distinguish between the quasi-medical γυμναστής and the παιδοτρίβης, whose job was primarily to deal with sporting technique, by contrast with the concern of the γυμναστής with health and bodily condition. Galen and others want to confine the expertise of the athletic trainer to παιδοτριβική, and to portray it as a relatively trivial kind of knowledge. And it is hard to avoid the impression that Pollux would agree. In the middle of 155 he gives us a brief list of terms for various kinds of wrestling hold: ἄγχειν, στρέφειν, ἀπάγειν, λυγίζειν, ἀγκυρίζειν, ῥάσσειν, ἀνατρέπειν, ὑποσκελίζειν. It is almost as though we are hearing in these final lines of Onomasticon Book 3 the voice of the παιδοτρίβης instructing his charges.Footnote ⁴⁷ Three of those words—ἄγχειν, λυγίζειν and ὑποσκελίζειν—occur within the first twenty words or so of Lucian's Anacharsis, with its mocking portrayal of the senselessness of wrestling practice in the gymnasium. For any reader who happens to know the Lucianic work, assuming it was written earlier, the effect would be to debunk the trainer's authority. Alternatively, the Anacharsis may post-date Onomasticon Book 3; if so, Lucian may be drawing on Pollux’ word list rather irreverently for this opening description (that seems perfectly possible, given that Pollux has often been taken to be one of the targets of Lucian's mockery in other works, especially in the Lexiphanes). Either way the parallel is not a flattering one. Finally the book comes to an abrupt end in the phrase already discussed above: ‘λῦτο δ' ἀγών’, καὶ ἔστω τέλος τοῦ βιβλίου. There Pollux asserts his own control, taking over the position of the agonothete and festival organizer who had opened this section back in 3.140. The words he quotes are the opening words of Iliad Book 24, the words of the poet, speaking immediately after the final words of Achilles, who in his role as organizer of the funeral games to Patroclus has just brought the contests to a close at the end of Book 23.

BOOKS 4 AND 7

The low profile of the profession of the athletic trainer is all the more striking when we turn to Book 4. Book 4 is dedicated to vocabulary linked with the liberal arts. That makes it one of the more coherent books of the Onomasticon as a whole: for the most part it lacks the disjointedness of Book 3, as Pollux moves systematically from one intellectual discipline to the next in turn. The contents of the book are summarized at 4.16: ‘The more liberal types of knowledge or art are the following: grammar, dialectic, rhetoric—both political and sophistic—poetry, music, astronomy, geometry, arithmetic, weighing, medicine’ (εἴδη δ’ ἐπιστημῶν ἢ τεχνῶν τῶν ἐλευθεριωτέρων γραμματική, διαλεκτική, ῥητορική—ἡ αὐτὴ καὶ πολιτικὴ καὶ σοφιστική—, ποιητική, μουσική, ἀστρονομία, γεωμετρία, ἀριθμητική, στατική, ἰατρική). Pollux then maps out the key vocabulary for each of these areas at enormous length, especially for music, which takes up nearly half the book from 4.57 to 4.143. It is hard to avoid the feeling that the portrayal of athletic activity in Book 3 was cursory by comparison. Pollux actually draws attention to that distinction at the end of 3.145, where he says that ‘the words associated with music will be dealt with in the section on music’, before launching into his very brief survey of the various different athletic events. It is the trainer in particular who is belittled by the difference between Books 3 and 4. We should not necessarily see that as a deliberate and carefully orchestrated snub—the ideological underpinnings of Pollux’ ordering decisions may not always be clear even to himself—but here again it is apparent that Pollux would have sided more closely with his contemporary Galen than with Philostratus in the debate over the relationship between γυμναστική and the other arts outlined above.

That becomes even more obvious in Book 7, where Pollux turns to less prestigious kinds of expertise (7.6): ‘And as for the arts which are to follow, one might call them βάναυσοι (“banausic” or “associated with craft”), ἀγοραῖοι (“associated with trade” or “common”), ἀνελεύθεροι (“servile”), ἀπειρόκαλοι (“vulgar”), ἑδραῖοι (“sedentary”), χειροτεχνικαί (“reliant on handiwork”), χειρουργικαί (“reliant on handiwork”), and as Xenophon calls them βαναυσικαί (“banausic”)’ (καὶ μὴν ἐπί γε τῶν ἑξῆς τεχνῶν εἴποι ἄν τις τέχναι βάναυσοι, ἀγοραῖοι, ἀνελεύθεροι, ἀπειρόκαλοι, ἑδραῖοι, χειροτεχνικαί, χειρουργικαί, καὶ ὡς Ξενοφῶν βαναυσικαί). First, we are confronted with a range of different professions involved in buying and selling, including innkeepers and sellers of slaves and booty in 7.16-17 and various kinds of foodseller from 7.18 onwards—corn-merchants, bakers, fish-sellers, and so on. Sandwiched between these two groups is a passing mention of the athletic trainers (7.17): ‘The arts used for people are the arts of the παιδοτρίβαι and the γυμνασταί, and also οἱ σωμασκοῦντες (“exercisers of the body”). That last name is used for those who exercise themselves, but it could equally well be applied to those who exercise others. The word ἀλείπτης (“trainer”) was not in use, but the Middle Comic poets used the word ἀλείπτρια (“female trainer”) …’ (τέχναι δ’ ἐπ’ ἀνθρώποις παιδοτρίβαι καὶ γυμνασταί, καὶ οἱ σωμασκοῦντες· τάττεται μὲν ἡ κλῆσις ἐπὶ τῶν ἀσκουμένων, οὐδὲν δ’ ἂν αὐτὴν κωλύοι κἀπὶ τῶν ἀσκούντων τετάχθαι. τοῦ δ’ ἀλείπτου οὐκ ὄντος ἐν χρήσει ἀλείπτριαν εἰρήκασιν οἱ μέσοι κωμικοί). The logical progression between that very brief paragraph and what comes before and after is far from clear. Nevertheless, it is clear that the surrounding association with profit is not likely to be flattering, given that the liberal technai in the ancient imagination were generally separated from vulgar money-earning, and given that innkeepers in particular seem to have had a reputation for vulgarity. That is not to say that Pollux sees a clear-cut distinction between admirable liberal arts in Book 4 and unprestigious banausic arts in Book 7. Sophistic rhetoric in particular is linked with money-earning in 4.42-3.Footnote ⁴⁸ And it is clear that even his account of craft vocabulary in Book 7 is intended largely as a celebration of the richness and the diversity of the full spectrum of cultural activity within the Greek tradition; perhaps also in some cases as an attempt to reimagine and elevate low-status activities by the application of old-fashioned vocabulary. But it is also clear that Pollux’ vision of human expertise includes a fairly clear-cut distinction between higher and lower technai, without much sense of that distinction being debatable, and that athletic training falls firmly into the latter category.

BOOK 10

The last substantial mention of athletic training comes in Book 10. Here the association between athletics and expertise is lost from view almost entirely, and we see athletics reimagined instead as a de-professionalized activity that takes its place within a life of elite leisure.Footnote ⁴⁹ The context for that reassessment is the long central segment of the book, stretching from 10.32 to 10.124. It is a remarkable part of the work. It is one of the sections where we can see most clearly both the Onomasticon's narrative potential and also its capacity to project a very distinctive vision of what matters most within human culture. It envisages someone moving through the day from morning to evening, with a list of the many objects he or she (but most often the imagined subject is male) comes into contact with on the way (the book as a whole is on tools and equipment).Footnote ⁵⁰ The life it imagines is (as one would expect) elitist and classicizing. And it anticipates, by implication, an active response from the reader. The imagined reader is a connoisseur of language. Each of these words is to be remembered and savoured. We are invited to let them resurface in our minds as we go about our daily lives. They are labels we can apply to our own day-to-day encounters with the material world of things, as we run our eyes or our fingers over objects which in normal life might seem functional and inert and mundane, but which are transformed, by the way of viewing that Pollux’ text teaches us, into foundations on which we can imprint our own sense of social and literary identity. The special applicability of this book in particular is hinted at in the preface: ‘And I think that, when you try it, this book will seem above all the others in its usefulness. For even if none of the others was outside what is useful, this one at any rate involves all the most accustomed objects and the ones we use all the time’ (καὶ οἶμαί σοι πειρωμένῳ φανεῖσθαι τουτὶ τὸ βιβλίον ὑπὲρ πάντα τῇ χρείᾳ· καὶ γὰρ εἰ μηδὲ τῶν ἄλλων μηδὲν ἔξω τοῦ χρησίμου, τοῦτο γοῦν διὰ τῶν συνηθεστάτων ἥκει καὶ ὧν ἑκάστοτε χρῄζομεν).Footnote ⁵¹

The opening paragraphs then offer a range of different words for what we might in English call ‘tools’ or ‘utensils’ or ‘implements’ or ‘furniture’ and related concepts. At 10.22, Pollux moves to words for ‘door’ and objects connected with doors: ‘If it is right to speak first among implements about doors …’ (τῶν δὲ σκευῶν εἰ πρῶτα τὰ περὶ τὰς θύρας ῥητέον …) (ancient doors were clearly viewed as moveable and detachable, rather than integrated parts of the fabric of a building). He then moves on at 10.28 to various words connected with brooms and vessels for carrying water (by the reasoning that it is the job of a doorman to sweep and sprinkle the floors). 10.32 turns our attention to beds and couches and rugs and cushions (again the reference-point for the transition is doors, since Pollux starts with various words for the hanging which is situated at bedroom entrances). Here Pollux draws a distinction between bed words associated with slaves (τοῖς μὲν οἰκέταις, 10.43), including various words for rush mats, and the bedroom equipment needed by masters (τοῖς δὲ δεσπόταις, 10.44), specifically chamber-pots (with different words for male and female varieties).

At 10.46 the day begins: ‘when one gets up after sleeping and it is necessary to wash the face, the slave-boy, holding a water jug, will carry it over, pouring out fresh water into a cauldron or washing-tub’ (ἐξαναστάντι δ' ἐξ ὕπνου τὸ πρόσωπον ἀπονίπτεσθαι δέον, ὁ παῖς πρόχουν τινὰ ἔχων προσοίσει, νεαροῦ τοῦ ὕδατος ἐπιχέων κατὰ λέβητος ἢ λουτηρίου τινός). Here again, the contrast between high and low status is clear.Footnote ⁵² The water-pouring slave-boy is linked implicitly with the water-sprinkling doorkeeper from several paragraphs earlier, who has similarly been associated with a range of different words for different kinds of water vessel. And from there, Pollux works his way in leisurely fashion through the activities by which one prepares oneself, after bed, to face the outside world: first, words for chairs, then shoes and slippers, then rings (missing out words for clothes because they have been dealt with already, as he reminds us). And then from 10.51 to 10.123, where we return finally to the bedroom at the end of the day, we are given a tour of many of the places and activities which played a key role in the self-image of Greek elite males not just in the classical world but also in the many succeeding centuries. Exercise has a prominent place, as the first-mentioned activity, and it is blatantly exercise for the elite that he has in mind (10.51): ‘If anyone wants to make use of passive exercise, of the kind that takes place in carriages, in the early morning in summer before the sun is hot, it is necessary to know the types of carriage …’ (ἀλλ’ εἰ μὲν αἰωρήσει τῇ δι’ ὀχημάτων χρῷτό τις περὶ τὴν ἕω, θέρους ὄντος, πρὶν ἢ τὸν ἥλιον περιφλέγειν, τὰ εἴδη τῶν ὀχημάτων ἰστέον), which are then listed at length, along with various kinds of horse-riding paraphernalia: being carried in a carriage was viewed as a type of exercise in a range of different medical texts from precisely the period Pollux was writing. We then have words connected with books and writing materials—‘And if, after passive exercise or after a stroll in the stoa or in a colonnade or in a wood one turns to the companionship of books …’ (εἰ δὲ ἀπὸ τῆς αἰωρήσεως ἢ καὶ ἀπό τινος περιπάτου ἐν στοᾷ ἢ δρόμῳ ἢ ἄλσει γενόμενος ἐπὶ τὴν πρὸς τὰ βιβλία συνουσίαν τις τρέποιτο, 10.57)—then law-court equipment, for example water clocks and voting urns.

From the courtroom we move to the gymnasium (10.62-5):

Here the gymnasium is represented as a place of leisure for a busy member of the elite, sandwiched between law-court and symposium. Pollux’ list does include equipment associated with competition (the discuses and the javelins), but he seems at least equally interested in what precedes and follows the exercise itself—the processes of washing and storing clothes, for example—and his list evokes above all the world of fifth-century gymnasium culture as we see it in comedy and the law-court speeches, and also in the vase paintings of classical Athens (although there is no particular reason to imagine any familiarity with those on Pollux’ part), where the objects with which one is depicted are markers of one's membership of an elite community based on shared day-to-day customs. At the same time the close combination of bathing and exercise envisaged here is perhaps intended to bring those images of gymnasium culture up-to-date for Pollux’ own Roman Imperial culture, given that bath buildings were not routinely attached to gymnasia in the classical period.

The rest of the day is taken up with dinner and drinking, before we finally retire to sleep, back where we started, in 10.123: ‘For one who has dined and gone to bed, the words for bedspreads and coverings have already been given …’ (δειπνήσαντι δὲ καὶ πρὸς κοίτην τραπομένῳ τὰ μὲν στρώματα καὶ ἐπιβλήματα προείρηται). The section on dining contains an enormously long list of words not only for different kinds of drinking vessels but also (in 10.95 ff.) for the vessels and other tools used by butchers and cooks and bread-makers. Those passages extend the impression we have glimpsed several times already—for example in 10.30-1, for the floor-cleaning implements of the doorkeeper, in 10.44 for the chamber-pots and washing basins of the bedroom, or, in 10.63-4, for the washing equipment of the bath building—that Pollux is keen to map out very precise gradations of use and status in the vast vocabulary of ancient vessels, offering an inventory of the words used by people of both high and middling status, but at the same time distinguishing them clearly from each other.Footnote ⁵³ Here too the focus is on classicizing terms, with regular quotations from classical authorities, although the very opening topic of the section on the symposium, on the subject of water-heaters, is once again intriguingly modern in character, since the water-heater seems to have been largely an invention of the Roman period.Footnote ⁵⁴ Pollux had made it clear in the preface to Book 10 that he would be quoting more frequently from earlier authorities in this book than in previous ones, but also that he would need to draw some words from his own experience, and the effect is a blurring of classicizing and contemporary elite culture (10.2).Footnote ⁵⁵ Admittedly his focus on elite perspective is not consistent: as we saw in the previous section, he is keen to acknowledge or even celebrate the day-to-day business of expertise in a vast range of jobs and crafts below the level of the educated elite. But in the gymnasium scenes at least it is clear that we are following the imagined high-status figure, who is the dominant focalizer for the journey from morning to night which lies at the heart of Book 10.