You Could Look It Up (44 page)

The information is densely packed. Liddell and Scott dwell on the ways literal meanings shade into figurative ones, and they even stray from purely linguistic information to provide insights into Greek folkways and material culture. Citations to parallels in other works abound. The eras that get the most attention from scholars and students get the most thorough treatment: the detail is greater for classical Attic than later Hellenistic or biblical Greek. This sometimes unbalances the
Lexicon
, since the most-quoted authors are not necessarily most typical of the language, but it does show Liddell and Scott’s devotion to pedagogy.

The reviews were strong. As one reviewer noted, “The merits of this work … will drive every other Greek dictionary out of circulation, wherever the English language is spoken, and will continue to be used for years, perhaps for generations to come.”
12
In that he was correct. One splenetic reviewer, J. R. Fishlake, tried his best to complain about Liddell and Scott, but even he had trouble finding things to object to:
“having examined this Lexicon word by word through many, very many pages, we have not discovered in it more defects of this kind than might fairly have been expected, in proportion to its size, and considering it to be a first edition; and those which we have seen are not generally of a glaring character, nor of any very material consequence.” He was obliged, almost against his will, to declare, “it constitutes already a sterling addition to the library; and reflects indisputably very high honour on its authors.”
13

Success was immediate, and only grew. The first edition appeared in a print run of three thousand copies, but by the time of the sixth edition, 1869, the presses turned out fifteen thousand copies. Over the years it continued to be improved. Liddell revised the seventh (1883) and eighth (1897) editions himself, and the ninth edition, the first to be undertaken after Liddell’s death, was a major revision, carried out by Sir Henry Stuart Jones and Roderick McKenzie. Jones’s contribution was important enough that modern editions are known as “Liddell-Scott-Jones,” or “LSJ.”

But before Jones’s name was added to the masthead, one other name was dropped. In the first edition, the editors acknowledged their debt to their most important German predecessor: “our Work is said to be ‘based on the German Work of F
RANCIS
P
ASSOW
.’ We cannot too fully express our obligations to this excellent book, without which ours never would have been attempted.”
14
The second and third editions continued to praise their great predecessor. But their graciousness did not last: the fourth edition of 1855 dropped Passow’s name from the title page.

Liddell and Scott drew a sharp line between the lexical and the encyclopedic, and they stayed firmly on the lexical side. Others, though, sought to illuminate the ancient world in more wide-ranging works.

William Smith, an Englishman, knew that “scarcely a single subject included under the general name of Greek and Roman Antiquities … has not received elucidation from the writings of the modern scholars of Germany.”
15
He therefore planned to collect the latest in German antiquarian knowledge, scattered through many learned volumes, and to bring it together in a one-volume compendium suited to the needs of
students. It would come with citations to the best modern scholarship that would allow the more diligent students to follow the leads. His
Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities
appeared in 1842.

The most extensive treatment the classical world has ever received, though, followed not long after. Like Liddell and Scott’s
Lexicon
, it began as a revised version of something that already existed. August Friedrich Pauly started publishing his German encyclopedia of the classical world in 1837, and though Pauly died young, his work was completed and supplemented by Wilhelm Siegmund Teuffel and Christian Waltz as the
Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft in alphabetischer Ordnung
(
Encyclopedia of Classical Knowledge in Alphabetical Order
, 6 vols. in 9 parts) in 1852.
16
But Pauly’s work was superseded by a French
Dictionnaire des antiquités grecques et romaines
(1873–1919), and it would hardly be remembered today but for a successor, Georg Wissowa, who was not even born when Pauly died. Wissowa was the main force behind a revised version of Pauly, known today as Pauly-Wissowa.

The revised version fills an entire bookcase and then some. Though it was begun at the end of the nineteenth century, it is still essential for anyone interested in ancient Greece or Rome. The German word
Altertumswissenschaft
gives some idea of the book’s scope: it means “knowledge of ancient times,” and anything at all related to antiquity—history, literature, drama, clothing, food, philosophy, numismatics, military tactics, language, architecture—was included. It was cultural studies applied to the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome. The learning manages to be both dense and wide-ranging, as in this entry on
Draco
:

7)
Δράκων
,
Serpens
,
Anguis
, large constellation in the northern hemisphere, see S t e r n b i l d e r. The mythological D. was regarded as the dragon who guarded the apples of Hesperides and, after Heracles killed him, was placed in the sky by Hera or Zeus. According to Pherecydes (see frg. 33), the Earth gave the golden apples to Zeus and Hera at their wedding, and Hera planted them in the garden of the gods, near Atlas. But since the Hesperides always picked the apples, Hera placed the dragon to guard the garden (Eratosth. Catast. 3. Hyg. astr. II 3. Schol. Arat. 45. Schol.
Germ. BP 60, 7ff. G 116, 21. S 117, 1ff., s. H e s p e r i d e n). The dragon is in conjunction with the nearby constellation of Heracles (
ὁ  ʾΕνγόνασιν
), who, placed by Zeus among the stars, places his foot on the D.’s head (Eratosth. 4. Hyg. astr. II 6. Schol. Arat. 74. Schol. Germ. BP 61, 3ff. G 118, 18ff. S 118, 2ff.; on the relationship between Eratosth. 3 and 4 see O l i v i e r i I catasterismi di Eratostene, S.-A. in Stud. ital. di filol. class. V 1ff.). There were a number of other interpretations. Either the D. was the Python’s dragon (
ὡς δὲ ὁ πολὺς λόγος
,
ὁ
πὸ  ʾΑπόλλωνος ἀναιρεθε
ς Πύθων
), or the dragon killed by Cadmus (Schol. Arat. 45), or a dragon that Athena, in a fight with the giant Mimas, threw into the sky, where he still slithers (Hyg. astr. II 3. Schol. Germ. BP 60, 15ff.). According to a Cretan myth, Zeus, to escape the persecutions
of his father Kronos, changed himself into a snake and his attendants into she-bears. When he later took charge, he immortalized this event in the stars (Schol. Arat. 46). Finally, it could be the snake that Dionysus led as a sign of the shield and placed in the sky as a token of the virginity of Chalcomede (Nonn. Dionys. XXV 402ff. XXXIII 370ff.).

The major characters behind Pauly-Wissowa were great scholars, but neither lived an especially interesting life. Pauly was a classical philologist, educated at the University of Tübingen, then and now one of the most prestigious universities in Germany. He spent most of his career teaching Greek and Latin literature at the Gymnasium in Stuttgart and died in 1845 just shy of his forty-ninth birthday. Georg Wissowa was born in 1859 in Wroc
ł
aw, in what is now Poland, and attended the local university. He landed a job as a classical philologist at the University of Marburg, where he specialized in Roman religion. He was known in his time for revising another reference book, Theodor Mommsen’s
Handbuch der römischen Alterthümer
(
Manual of Roman Antiquities
).

The original idea for a revised Pauly came from a scholar named Otto Crusius, but Crusius quickly changed his mind and relinquished the task to Wissowa, who declared his intention to produce a wholly new work, not merely a light revision. The plan was for a work in ten volumes in as many years. The story should be familiar by now: it wound up in ninety-eight volumes in nearly as many years. Wissowa, who lived to be seventy-one, died as the encyclopedia had reached
M
, and after his death the editorship passed to a series of philologists: Wilhelm Kroll, Karl Mittelhaus, Konrat Ziegler, Hans Gärtner. Inevitably a work published over several decades will be inconsistent, and that is true of Pauly-Wissowa. New scholarly discoveries make their appearance, and shifting scholarly interests and fashions give the volumes slightly different characters. Some scholars have noted hints of Nazi ideology in the volumes from the 1930s and ’40s, followed by a shift away from those principles after the Second World War came to an end. The project was finally completed in 1980.

The reviews, which began appearing shortly after the first volume was published in 1894, were not so much glowing as awestruck. Many
were amazed at the breadth of the coverage. As one early reviewer pointed out, “it includes all the names of persons of any historical importance whatsoever”—so, for instance, we get more than a hundred people named
Alexandros
and 127 named
Annius
.
17
But it had depth as well as breadth, and the real strength of Pauly-Wissowa shows up in the long entries—extended essays, some dozens of pages long, signed by the contributors, with extensive references to the scholarly literature. The article for
princeps
occupied thirteen columns of small type;
Praxiteles
filled twenty-three;
praetor
twenty-seven;
prähistorische Kulturen
ninety-eight.
Praefectus
took up ninety columns in the main alphabetical sequence, with another eighty-eight in the supplement at the end of the volume.

The encyclopedia’s greatest virtue was the quality of the scholarship. The specialized knowledge in every one of the subjects it covered—military history, literature, philology, archaeology, monumental inscriptions, even the history of agriculture—was greater than what had appeared in any comparable reference work before.
18
Modern encyclopedias are collaborative endeavors, and editors work to line up contributors in various areas of expertise. Getting the best person for every article is difficult, and editors often have to settle for someone who is merely good enough. Wissowa, though, somehow managed to get the best people in the field, or, more accurately, fields. He initially signed up 119 experts, mostly German university professors, but as the work stretched out over multiple generations, more signed on, and the roster became more international. Eventually 1,096 contributors pitched in. The result is the first port of call for anyone working on the Greek or Roman world.