Peter Jones

The Cambridge Greek Lexicon is an eye-opener for classical scholars

This pioneering dictionary is a triumphant achievement — authoritative, precise and a real pleasure to use compared with its predecessors

Professor James Diggle with the Cambridge Greek Lexicon.

The great Latinist D.R. Shackleton Bailey was once said to have been pinned into a corner at a party and ordered to reveal what he actually did. ‘I just look things up all day,’ came the tetchy reply.

That will ring a loud bell with those who learned ancient Greek or Latin at school, especially when it came to looking up the meaning of a word in LSJ, Oxford’s big Greek-English dictionary, or rather lexicon (Greek lexikos, ‘of or for words’). It was named after the initials of its two original editors (Henry) Liddell and (Robert) Scott, and a later revising editor (Henry Stuart) Jones, and was so full of Greek that it took about a day to find the meaning you were actually looking for.

Leaning heavily on Franz Passow’s Greek-German dictionary, LSJ was published in 1843 at a price equivalent to £235. Following a tradition going back to Henri Estienne’s massive, ground-breaking Greek Thesaurus of 1572, its actual purpose was to give a historico-linguistic account of the Greek language. Hence its vast size and scope (some called it ‘Great Scott’). The latest (ninth) edition (1940) consists of more than 2,000 A4 pages of small-type, close-set Greek and English, weighs 10lbs and features more than 116,000 entries gleaned from countless literary and other sources. A supplement adds 320 pages of corrections and additions, revealing that the Greekshad a word for ‘to be changed into a cow’. Ino, Ino. It also includes the very earliest Greek from the economic records of Linear B, taking the reader back to 1450 BC.

Picture now the beginner turning to LSJ for the first time, each entry forested with illustrative quotations in Greek, each one fully referenced but very few translated, and the English meanings peeping shyly out of the impenetrable Greek thickets in no discernibly logical sequence.

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