by Mary Norris
THE AUTHORITATIVE SOURCE on ancient Greek words is Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon, first published in 1843. (Most classicists pronounce the name Liddell.) Its origins are somewhat mythical: in one version, a publisher approached a student named Robert Scott with the idea for a Greek-English lexicon, and Scott said he would do it only if his friend Henry George Liddell would share the work.
Liddell was said to be the epitome of an Oxford don. Tall, white-haired, and aristocratic, he was ordained in the Church of England and was chaplain to Prince Albert, the husband of Queen Victoria. He and his wife had ten children, one of whom was to become “the most famous little girl in English literature”: Alice Liddell. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson used to watch her and her sisters playing in the deanery garden as he worked in the library. She inspired him, as Lewis Carroll, to write the stories that turned into Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. An early adopter of the camera, Dodgson photographed Alice in different costumes and poses. These days, he would be summoned before a committee on sexual miscondunct. Alice was also pursued by John Ruskin, but, unimpressed with her literary suitors, she married a cricketer named Reginald Hargreaves.
Liddell and Scott began work in 1834, basically translating a Greek-German lexicon by one Franz Passow, who in turn had based his work on a dictionary begun by Johan Gotlob Schneider earlier that century.
To classicists, a lexicon differs from a dictionary in being a collection of words occurring in the work of a given group of authors, with citations and definitions. Passow had begun with Homer and Hesiod and started on Herodotus; Liddell and Scott picked up with Herodotus and Thucydides. Liddell’s biographer describes their method: “The uses of each word were traced from its simplest and most rudimentary meaning to its various derivative and metaphorical applications. . . . [E]ach gradation was illustrated as far as possible historically, by apt quotations from authors of successive dates.”
Scott’s career took him to Cornwall, where he was not well situated to continue work on the lexicon. (No email.) Liddell became dean of Christ Church, Oxford. In July 1842, he wrote to Scott, “You will be glad to hear that I have all but finished Π”—pi—“that two-legged monster, who must in ancient times have worn his legs a-straddle, else he could never have strode over so enormous a space as he has occupied and will occupy in Lexicons.” By the time Liddell published the eighth edition, in 1897, fifty-four years later—a year before his death—the volume included vocab ulary from the dramatists and philosophers. It was later enlarged by Henry Stuart Jones, and the 1968 edition, with supplement, runs to more than 2,000 pages.
Before Liddell and Scott, the only way for an English speaker to learn Greek was through Latin. As Liddell and Scott wrote in a preface to the lexicon, they intended the work to “foster and keep alive . . . that tongue which, as the organ of Poetry and Oratory, is full of living force and fire, abounding in grace and sweetness, rich to overflowing . . . that tongue in which some of the noblest works of man’s genius lie enshrined—works which may be seen reflected faintly in imitations and translations, but of which none can know the perfect beauty, but he who can read the words themselves, as well as their interpretation.”
ONE OF THE THINGS that make a language a language, that give it currency, is the small, indefinable, not strictly necessary words that connect you to the person you’re talking to. They might be slang, they might be idiom, they might be baby talk. Linguists dryly call them “function words”; in Greek grammar they are known as particles. They rope you in. In English we use them all the time and are almost helpless not to use them. If we become self-conscious about them, we are tongue-tied. Some people deplore the extra words as loose and repetitive, and complain that kids today are lazy and inarticulate and that they are destroying the beauty and precision of the language. But we have relied on such little words since antiquity. They enrich the language as they help us get along with one another.
I overheard a young woman on the street say to her companion, “And then I like flipped out last week actually?” What was she saying, with those extra words and the interrogatory intonation? Stripped to its essentials, her sentence would be “I flipped out last week.” The conjunction “and,” the adverb “then,” the ubiquitous all-purpose “like,” and the intensifier “actually” combine to smooth out the utterance, tuck it into a larger story, and appeal for understanding. The question mark, for upspeak, lends piquancy, as if to substitute for “you know?” at the end and signal that the woman is not finished, that there were consequences to her flipping out.
English is loaded with particles, words and expressions that float up constantly in speech: like, totally, so, you know, OK, really, actually, honestly, literally, in fact, at least, I mean, quite, of course, after all, hey, fuck, sure enough . . . know what I mean? Just sayin’. And it’s not only the young who use them. Some particles function as sentence adverbs: hopefully, surely, certainly. Some are conjunctions with attitude (“and furthermore . . .”), conjuring a shaken fist. They keep the conversation going. Although they have no content, they are the soul of the language.
Particles are used to ingratiate, to engage. I once heard myself say in the locker room at the pool, “Is there like no hot water?” To someone my own age or older, I might have said, “Isn’t there any hot water?” But I was speaking to a younger person. My choice of words was not conscious manipulation; I was making a spontaneous effort to blend in (difficult at a public pool). Similarly, in conversation, I might say, “So, you know, I was like totally blown away,” but in writing I might edit it to the more contained “I was impressed.”
Writing has its own fillers—“as it were,” “as one does,” “be that as it may,” “without further ado”—some of them more formal and stilted than others. Orin Hargraves, in It’s Been Said Before: A Guide to the Use and Abuse of Clichés, tracks the frequency with which writers (especially journalists) use such phrases, which are perhaps better described as idioms than clichés but are nonetheless formulaic. As a copy editor, I have often been tempted to strip them out. “Truth be told,” as a transition, is way overused.
Particles define the speech patterns of friends, especially when they are poets or writers with idiosyncratic language habits, overwhelmed with the need for self-expression. A poet friend often stammers “and and and,” until I want to scream, “Spit it out!” Another friend is partial to the construction “didn’t I just,” as in “Didn’t I just leave my phone on the park bench.” This has a slightly self-deprecatory tang, as if to comment on typical self-sabotaging behavior. There are people who bob their heads up and down while they’re talking to you or offer significant eyebrow action, which is intended to get you to agree with them. (Resist!) “Yada yada yada” is another version of the poet’s “and and and.” A friend used to pronounce it “Yada yada yada.” Some of these speech patterns are lovable. I think of William F. Buckley, Jr., stammering and flicking his tongue in a debate, or David Foster Wallace repeatedly using “And but so” to great effect, like a trademark, in his essays.
And how did we ever get along without OK? OK is a pivot point (OK, now I’m going to write about OK); it elicits a response from the listener (I’m going to talk about OK, OK?); it announces the beginning of the end of the discussion (So that’s all I have to say, OK?). OK has become such a feature of informal speech that we play with it, texting the single letter K, or affecting an Australian accent, Kye?
English has a sack load of these sometimes charming, often indefinable turns of phrase, and guess what: so does ancient Greek. It is because of the particles in Plato that Socrates has such a warm presence. Particles give personality to his language. Without them, it might be an automaton speaking. I was amazed, in reading Plato’s Apology of Socrates, how much nuance these syllables give to Socrates’ speech—they act like nudges, winks, facial expressions. You can almost see Socrates poking his listener as you hear his confidential “don’t ya know,” a folksy expression from a sage ol
der generation. Herbert Weir Smyth, of Harvard University, devoted 40 pages of his 1920 Greek Grammar to particles. Another scholar, J. D. Denniston, published a 600-page book titled The Greek Particles, devoted solely to the subject, in 1934. Smyth (whose name rhymes with “writhe”) writes that particles “often resist translation by separate words, which in English are frequently over emphatic and cumbersome in comparison to the light and delicate nature of the Greek originals.”
One of the first particles a student of ancient Greek learns comes in a pair: μέν and δέ. They are traditionally translated as “on the one hand . . . and on the other hand . . .” In English, this has always seemed to me, on the one hand, heavy-handed, predictable, and boring. On the other hand, there is no denying that it works as a rhetorical device. At The New Yorker, someone could not write “on the other hand” if he had not already written “on the one hand,” or we’d point that out. Greek was not so stern. People fall in love with μέν and δέ, swooning over the way their habitual use demonstrates something about the Greek character, as if the notion of antithesis were baked right into the language.
One of the simplest particles, still in use in modern Greek, is καί, a conjunction meaning “and” and an adverb meaning “even, also, too.” When the Greeks rolled out a list—a series—they would repeat καί between the items, and this repetitive “and” would have no more weight than a comma. They never had to think about the serial comma. Kαί εγώ is translated as a modest demurral, “I on my part”; colloquially, we might be tempted to render it ΙΜΗΟ. Kαί has also been translated as “pray,” to stress the word that follows, as in “Pray, you try to explain particles.” In combination with other particles, καί “often has an emphasis which is difficult to render,” Smyth writes. Τι καί (literally “what and”) can mean, in polite terms, “What on earth?” or, in saltier terms, “What the fuck?”
WTF, Socrates?
Unfortunately, as Smyth says, these untranslatable verbal inflections often get translated anyway, laboriously or to antiquated effect. Shakespeare can get away with “forsooth” and “methinks,” but Socrates was not an Elizabethan. Jesus says, “Verily I say unto you,” but Socrates was not a New Testament figure, either. He was a real person who said the sorts of thing a Jewish grandmother might say, like “Alright already.”
So what are we supposed to do? On the one hand, a stiff translation will not gain Socrates any followers, and, on the other hand, an informal approach can sound glib. Rossellini, in his film Socrates, has Socrates part with his followers by saying “A presto” —“See you soon.” Smyth specifies one use of μέν δή, which is slightly different from δέ, in an expression that he translates as “So much for that,” an idiom that the translator Robert Fitzgerald puts into the mouth of Odysseus when he has finished off Penelope’s suitors. This made me burst out laughing, but apparently it is exactly the sort of thing the Greeks said to one another when they wrapped something up.
As a copy editor, accustomed to pointing out clichés and repetitions and, you know, extra verbiage (writers still sometimes get paid by the word), I am alert to and often averse to space fillers in written English, though I am aware that these things serve a purpose. If I were Plato’s copy editor, would I edit all the juice out of Socrates? There are things in Greek that are more delicate than anything in English, and the particles are the connective tissue not just in conversation but in formal prose and poetry. For instance, the librarians of Alexandria could, with the flick of a pen, distinguish the particle νν, with a circumflex accent, meaning “now, as the case stands, as it is,” from νυν, meaning “now” in the inferential sense, marking, as Smyth ably puts it, “the connection of the speaker’s thought with the situation in which he is placed.” At The New Yorker, we had our own solution for differentiating the force of “now”: in the temporal sense, meaning “at this moment” (“Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party,” the line that ancient typists traditionally used to test a typewriter), “now” stands alone, but in the rhetorical, stylistic sense (“Now, you’re not going to like this”) we would set “now” off with a comma, a cue of punctuation intended to bring the reader along with ease.
Smyth attributes another such subtle effect to a particle he calls the “untranslatable τέ.” This is a connective—a conjunction like “and”—that introduces a clause and “has the effect of showing that its clause corresponds in some way to the preceding clause.” Oh my God, it’s a semicolon! Perhaps this is why ancient Greek didn’t have a lot of punctuation—it didn’t need it. The punctuation was built in.
AMONG CLASSICISTS, of course, ancient Greek is far from dead. It is alive and wide open to interpretation, an object of fascinated speculation. One of the things I most love about Homer lives on as a source of endless controversy among classicists: his use of epithets. That there is still so much to be said about the Homeric epithet, a poetic device that is supposedly frozen in time, like the 5,000-year-old mummy found in the Alps, seems to me proof that ancient Greek is alive and well. Individual epithets continue to be reinterpreted and to inspire fresh translations. How can something that keeps unfolding possibly be dead?
In modern Greek, “epithet” simply means “adjective,” but Homeric epithets are loaded. An epithet, in its simplest form, identifies a character, endows him with individuality. For instance, I might refer to “my garrulous mother” or “her with the gift of gab.” Homer might be the source for the advice given to aspiring fiction writers: label a character with a defining feature or bit of business and reinforce it now and then to remind the reader. “Crooked-minded Kronos” never lets us forget the harsh nature of this god.
In the Iliad, nearly every minor character has some distinctive feature, especially at the moment of death. Epithets of the major characters conjure some personal quality, often thrillingly ambiguous, and that quality often acts as a catalyst for drama. Achilles is invariably “swift-footed,” and the reminders of this trait increase the terror of the scene in which he chases Hector around the citadel of Troy. Pol´ytropos, the epithet most often given to Odysseus, contains the word for many and the word for turn and has been translated in countless ways, everything from ingenious and resourceful to wily and manipulative. The epithet both inspires and eludes translators and gives Odysseus a mercurial character, which colors his adventures and suggests that our hero may have been something of a sneak.
But the epithets are not always distinctive. In search of Homer, the classics scholar Milman Parry studied oral poetry in Yugoslavia in the 1930s. Building on his dissertation of 1928, he formed the radical conclusion that epithets, which come in different metrical lengths, were largely a device that oral poets relied on to fill out a line or give them time to think of what came next. In other words, Homer vamped. Epic poetry was an oral tradition, and as such it relied on repetition. The rhapsodes and their audiences were illiterate. They had no sense that there was anything wrong with being repetitive.
Our culture is a written one. We document everything. We like variety; repetition bores us. So do we have any use for the same Homeric tricks? Translators, depending on their bent, faithfully follow Homer by using the epithets whenever he does (Richmond Lattimore), deploy the epithets judiciously (Robert Fitzgerald), vary them for the modern reader (Emily Wilson), crack them wide open (Christopher Logue), or do without (Stephen Mitchell).
But repetition has its uses. Before the invention of writing, it was the only way to remember things. In the Odyssey, the rams and ewes of the Cyclops are repeatedly described as fat and fleecy, and the Cyclops’ routine of bringing them in at night and milking the ewes in rigid order begins to seem a little labored: OK, Homer, we get it—Polyphemus may have his flaws, but he is good with animals and his system for cheesemaking cannot be beat. But then it turns out that whether or not he brings the rams inside along with the ewes is crucial, because Odysseus uses those rams, which need to be fat and fleecy, tied in threes, to make his escape, slingin
g his men under them (and saving the biggest ram for himself), so that in the morning the Cyclops, blind now, will not feel the stowaways as he pats down his livestock on their way out. The repetition is like theme music that builds suspense.
“Gray-eyed Athena” is one of Homer’s most famous epithets, and something that drew me to Athena from the beginning. I have my mother’s gray eyes (but not her gift of gab), so it pleased me to think I had something in common with Athena. Homer doesn’t describe just anyone’s eyes. Hera is “ox-eyed,” meaning, I suppose, that her eyes are wide set and a deep liquid brown, with a suggestion of strength and stubbornness. If Athena’s eyes are so important, the epithet “gray-eyed” must convey something ineffable about her character.
The word that Homer relies on for Athena is glaukópis (γλαυκώπις), with that op familiar from “optic”—of the eye—and even from Cyclopes, and glaukós carrying a range of meanings, one of them traditionally “gray.” He also uses glaukós to describe the sea—I picture gray-green—but, like “wine-dark” (oinóps), glaukópis may refer to a quality instead of a color. In this case, it would mean not the sea’s profound depths but its glittering surface. Gray-eyed is the traditional translation of glaukópis, used by both Lattimore and Fitzgerald. The variant spellings—gray (American) and grey (British)—shouldn’t make any difference, but they do. I know a copy editor who refused to change “grey” to “gray” in a poem, per New Yorker style, because he insisted there was a difference. (He was also a poet.) Grey, with the “ey,” suggests the spelling of “eye,” perhaps giving it more luster. The original Loeb translation, “flashing-eyed Athena,” comes with a footnote acknowledging the translation “grey-eyed,” but adding “if colour is meant it is almost certainly blue.”
