John Lempriere pioneered the modern classical dictionary but never understood its real power. He saw his masterpiece as a reference book rather than as a book for reading. To critics who complained about the small size of the print in the edition of 1792, he replied that they should be making only "occasional" use of it.
He was wrong. Lempriere's dictionary, a favourite of school prize days, Romantic poets and contemporary prose-writers, is a book for browsing. There is much disapproval these days of the "soundbite society" in which people allegedly listen only to fragments of symphonies, snippets of poetry and single slogans of speeches. Well, you can learn a lot about ancient societies by flitting around reference works.
Dictionaries do not, however, stand still. There is a tendency for them to expand, for their entries to become longer, their bulk more unwieldy. By 1825 Lempriere's work, under enthusiastic American editorship, had doubled in size. Treatises on Egypt and India were added; the entry on the Suda, a key tenth-century forebear for all compilers of classical works, had been expanded, as though in homage, from three lines to six whole columns of type, much of it in Latin.
The new Lempriere for today is this third edition of The Oxford Classical Dictionary, which, at 1,640 pages is more than half as long again as the second edition which has sat on our shelves since 1970. It is billed by its publisher on the cover as "the ultimate reference work on the classical world", a bold claim designed to satisfy the requirements of the marketplace and one with which I would not quarrel if "ultimate" is held to signify general excellence. It will certainly not, however, be the ultimate edition of its line. New editions will follow, reflecting the scholastic and political fashions of future ages. At the current rate of expansion, if my son wins one as a school prize, it will be in a multi-volume set. Will it be as inspiring to him as Lempriere was to the Romantic poets? I suspect not.
The increase in size comes from four sources. The first is from studies which, strange to recall, were wholly unrecognised in the 1960s when the second edition was prepared. Typical new entries include abortion, alcoholism, childbirth, gynaecology, homosexuality, intolerance, menopause and race. Feminism has answered questions that were never posed 20 years ago. These range from whether there were any ancient female philosophers to whether they were ever liberated enough to throw sanitary towels at unwanted suitors. For the verdict on both accounts, see the entries under menstruation and Hypatia of Alexandria.
The second source of expansion is the growth of interest in the relations of Greece and Rome with the near east. Classical studies no longer concentrate so exclusively on what Greece and Rome did for later Europe; they reach out into the many and marvellous influences on the classics themselves from Assyrians, Babylonians and Jews. There are new entries on Uruk, home of the sex-and-war goddess, Ishtar, and on the Naassenes, the Christian sect which believed Adam to be an hermaphrodite and traced the origins of this and other curious beliefs to Jesus's brother, James.
The third source is the decision to include essays on general themes useful to nonclassicists studying ecology or literacy, imperialism, Marxism or motherhood. Lempriere would not have approved but, from my limited use so far, the standard is high and the writers' powers of compression spectacular. The OCD's editors make clear that these general pieces are especially expected by North American readers. American writers too are given proper prominence.
The fourth reason for a 1,640-page dictionary is the simple advance in classical learning. Much has been rewritten since 1970 but few entries, apart from those for some spurious Greek pottery designers, have disappeared altogether. In 1970 there were no Vindolanda tablets, the revelatory personal records of the early Romans who held Hadrian's wall. There was no Tabula Irnitana, the most complete copy of the first century Flavian law for the new municipia, one of Rome's most important legacies to later Europe. Euergetism, a useful neologism of French scholarship to describe the early system of voluntary gift-giving by rich Greek citizens, had not come into general academic use. All these and many more are now succinctly covered.
The general feel of the dictionary is flatter than before. The purist might praise this as "greater evenness". Henry Wade-Gery's elegant entry on Thucydides has survived intact from 1949; Maurice Bowra's knowing article on Sappho has been replaced by the drier reliability of Margaret Williamson.
In ancient times it was the fashion to give books such as this a metaphorical title. Pamphilus called his reference book of the first century AD a "meadow", ideal, we might imagine, for the leisured browser. This new OCD is as valuable but also as charming as a well-ploughed factory-farm of grain; Pamphilus might perhaps have dubbed it "the prairie".
Peter Stothard is editor, The Times.
The Oxford Classical Dictionary: The Ultimate Reference Work on the Classical World
Editor - Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth
ISBN - 0 19 866172 X
Publisher - Oxford University Press
Price - £70.00
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