by Jack Lynch
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century publishing depended on a new technology, the stereotype or electrotype plate, that allowed publishers to reprint a book without resetting the whole thing in type. Mini-editions could be issued, each slightly different from those that came before, but only modest changes were possible in each, and nothing that altered the pagination. In this system, new edition numbers were reserved for major top-to-bottom revisions. There are many printings of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, for instance, with the later ones correcting the errors of the early ones, and sometimes new entries squeezed in when space could be found. The World Book Encyclopedia actually had a practice of issuing stickers and telling subscribers to paste them over the old pages to bring information up to date.1
The confusion is only becoming worse. In the electronic age, “editions” become close to meaningless. Software sometimes bears an edition number (Windows 8.1), or uses the year of its release as part of a trademark (Office 2010). But it feels meaningless to assign an edition number to, say, Wikipedia. Many guides to citation recommend giving the date of access, but even a date may not be enough. A Wikipedia entry may say one thing at 11:07 in the morning, and something very different at 11:08, and then be tweaked a dozen more times before noon.
CHAPTER 17
GRECIAN GLORY, ROMAN GRANDEUR
Victorian Eyes on the Ancient World
Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott
A Greek–English Lexicon
1843
August Pauly and
Georg Wissowa
Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft
1893–1980
Dictionaries of the ancient languages are among the earliest reference books we know—though the languages were not ancient when the first dictionaries were compiled. Even the ancient Greeks needed help with ancient Greek. By the late fourth century B.C.E., Greeks were already having trouble with Homer’s language from four centuries earlier. Scholars compiled dictionaries and grammars, most notably at the great Library of Alexandria and the Mouseion—the home of the Muses, the origin of our word museum.1
Bizarre stories circulate about Philetas of Cos, a late fourth-century-B.C.E. lexicographer. “He was remarkable,” wrote Sir John Sandys, “for the delicacy of his frame; it is even stated that he was compelled to wear leaden soles to prevent his being blown away by the wind.”2 His Ataktoi glossai (Miscellaneous Glosses) collected difficult words from Homer and other early writers and earned Philetas both a statue in his native town of Cos—a rare honor for a lexicographer—and a ribbing in the works of the comic playwright Strato.
Latin posed the same problems as Greek.3 Even in the Middle Ages, when scholars and clerics were still speaking Latin, the language had evolved to the point that many words in ancient literature were no longer understood. Despite rearguard efforts to keep Latin alive, by the seventeenth century only a tiny population spoke any Latin, and the written language was kept on scholarly life support. Greek was in even worse shape, at least in the West. For as long as Greece was part of the Byzantine, and then the Ottoman, Empire, the West had little contact with Greek as a living language; few Greek texts were in libraries, and no Greek grammars or dictionaries.
In 1478 Giovanni Crastoni published the first printed Greek–Latin dictionary, opening the works of Aristotle and Plato to scholars across Europe. The most important Greek lexicon of the age of print, though, was the Thesaurus linguae graecae that Henri Estienne—in Latin, Henricus Stephanus—published in four volumes in 1572. Estienne came from a learned family: his father, Robert, a distinguished Parisian printer, was the first to divide the Christian Bible into verses in his Greek New Testament in 1551. When Robert died in 1559, Henri took over the family printing business, specializing in classical texts, especially in Greek. He devoted himself to a project his father had begun, a dictionary of the ancient Greek language, translating the still-little-known Greek into the international language of scholarship, Latin.
Estienne needed a title for his wordbook. He could have chosen dictionarius or lexicon, but he instead followed his lexicographer father, who had settled on a less familiar Greek word: thesaurus ‘treasure-house’. The Thesaurus linguae graecae (Treasure-House of the Greek Language) frustrated Estienne endlessly. One of his assistants, Joannes Scapula, stole the page proofs and released a plagiarized Lexicon græco-latinum in 1579, forcing Estienne to compete in the marketplace with his own work sold at a discount.4 Still, the Thesaurus is a model of lexicography: its coverage is close to comprehensive, given the knowledge of the day; it lays out multiple senses of words clearly; and it includes plentiful illustrative quotations from a wide range of Greek authors.
As the decades passed, though, more ancient texts were discovered and more meanings were revealed. Estienne was reprinted over and over, often with additions and corrections, but after two hundred years, it was time for someone to redo the job from scratch. The new project came from a German scholar named Johann Gottlob Theaenus Schneider, who published his Kritisches griechisch–deutsches Handwörterbuch (A Concise Critical Greek–German Lexicon) in 1797–98. Though Schneider’s work is little used today, it deserves credit as the first Greek lexicon that was more than a repackaged Thesaurus. Unlike Estienne, who translated Greek into Latin, Schneider translated it into German, since the most advanced linguistic and classical scholarship in the world was then written in that language.
Another German classicist, Franz Ludwig Carl Friedrich Passow, was appointed in 1807 to a professorship in Greek thanks to a letter from his friend Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, then putting the finishing touches on the first part of Faust. One of his students was the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who boarded in Passow’s house. In 1812 Passow published Zweck, Anlage, und Ergänzung griechischer Wörterbücher (The Purpose, Planning, and Completion of Greek Dictionaries), in which he insisted lexicographers should strive to show the origin of every word, as well as every shift in the form or the meaning of that word over the centuries, supported with chronologically arranged quotations showing the word in use in actual literature. Earlier lexicographers had included quotations, but their arrangement was not systematic, and they did not appear with dates. Passow strove to be comprehensive in laying out his historical evidence. “Every word,” he wrote, “should be made to tell its own story,”5 which became a mantra for historically minded philologists in the nineteenth century.
Passow put his principles into action. He used Schneider’s Handwörterbuch as the basis of his own, producing the Handwörterbuch der griechischen Sprache (A Concise Dictionary of the Greek Language, 2 vols., 1819–24). It sports quotations from the whole range of classical Greek literature, and with “semantic bridges,” Passow showed how one basic sense ramified over the centuries into many other senses. This major contribution to what the Germans call Gräzistik, or ancient Greek philology, sold well—three editions and more than ten thousand copies by 1827. Those first few editions bore Schneider’s name prominently, but following a tradition in lexicography, the original compiler’s name eventually faded from view. By the fourth edition of 1831, it was no longer Johann Gottlob Schneiders Handwörterbuch der griechischen Sprache, but Handwörterbuch der griechischen Sprache von Franz Passow.
Passow would in turn get his comeuppance. He is remembered only because someone incorporated his work into an even greater lexicon—the greatest Greek lexicon of them all.
If Henry George Liddell is known at all to the larger world, it is not for his achievement in classical lexicography but for his daughter. Alice Liddell is still one of the most famous girls in the world, even if virtually nobody knows her last name. As a little girl she entranced a young mathematician and photographer, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who wrote several books about the imagined adventures of a girl named Alice under his pen name, Lewis Carroll.
But Henry Liddell deserves to be known in his own right. He was born in 1811 in County Durham to a clerical family with roots in the ancient n
obility. An unpublished memoir describes his introduction to classical studies: “On my sixth birthday I was promised a great honour and reward. My father took me up into his study and inducted me into the mysteries of the Eton Latin Grammar. I remember the day, the place, and the fact as clearly as if it were yesterday.” That the future classicist was a great reader, particularly fond of Robinson Crusoe, The Swiss Family Robinson, and the children’s stories of Maria Edgeworth, is fitting. But despite his love of learning, his time at school was insufferable. “I do not think that any sorrow of youth or manhood,” he recalled, “equalled in intensity and duration the blank and hopeless misery which followed the wrench of transference from a happy home to a school such as that to which received us in the summer of 1819.” He spent seven dismal years at Bishopton Grove, remembering about it nothing but “the sense of desolation, the utter despair, the wish that I could die on the spot.” He was no happier at the famous seventeenth-century Charterhouse School in Surrey: one letter to his father was dated from “Beastly Charterhouse.”6 He did, however, become friendly with the student who sat next to him, William Makepeace Thackeray.
After thirteen unhappy years, Liddell left for Oxford in 1829. “Never,” he wrote, “did pilgrim departing from an inhospitable mansion shake the dust from off his feet with more hearty satisfaction than I did on quitting the noble foundation” of Charterhouse.7 His mood picked up when he arrived at Christ Church, Oxford, where he received nearly perfect marks. His first-class honors in classics and mathematics led to his appointment as a tutor at Christ Church in 1836, and he became an Anglican priest two years later. He held a series of increasingly distinguished titles in the college, in the university, and in the church, rising to be domestic chaplain to Prince Albert himself—the husband of Queen Victoria. (“It is only an Honorary appointment,” he wrote to his sister, “i.e. there is no pay. Still it is an honour… . My name is not unknown or unnoticed in high quarters.”)8
TITLE: A Greek–English Lexicon, Based on the German Work of Francis Passow
COMPILER: Henry George Liddell (1811–98) and Robert Scott (1811–87)
ORGANIZATION: Alphabetical, α and ʾΑάατος to ʾΩώδης
PUBLISHED: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1843
PAGES: xviii + 1584
ENTRIES: 104,000
TOTAL WORDS: 2.3 million
SIZE: 10″ × 6¼″ (25 × 16 cm)
AREA: 685 ft2 (64 m2)
WEIGHT: 5 lb. (2.27 kg)
PRICE: £2 4s.
LATEST EDITION: A Greek–English Lexicon, 9th ed., rev. and augmented by Henry Stuart Jones with Roderick McKenzie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996)
At Christ Church, Liddell met some soon-to-be-big names—William Ewart Gladstone, a future prime minister, was a fellow undergraduate; later, John Ruskin would be among his students, calling him “the only man in Oxford among the masters of my day who knew anything of art.” The most momentous of his contacts, however, was a fellow student, Robert Scott. Liddell and Scott were both born in 1811, and both came from clerical families. Both were also impressive academics, for within months of his arrival at Oxford, Scott was awarded a series of scholarships, and like his colleague he took first-class honors. A distinguished Latin essay won him both a prize and the opportunity to become a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, in 1835, the year in which he, too, was ordained a priest. Like his fellow lexicographer, Scott held a series of academic and ecclesiastical posts. Despite the similarities, though, Liddell and Scott were not an obvious pair. They were political opposites, with Liddell supporting the Liberals and Scott the Tories. Still they managed to find a modus vivendi, and they began their collaboration in the early 1830s—what Christopher Stray calls “an exemplary case of lexicographical amity.”9 What led them to begin their lexicon is unclear. It may have been a publisher’s project: Talboys of Oxford may have reached out to them.10 Others think another tutor at Oxford urged them to work on the book.
“This is what we proposed to ourselves,” they wrote, “viz. to carry on what Passow had begun.” Passow’s fourth edition was the best Greek lexicon on the market, so it made sense that they would base their own work on it. The first plan was simply to translate Passow’s German into English, answering the need for a serious Greek–English dictionary, as the few attempts in English were weak. But they discovered that they needed to go beyond mere translation, and they resolved to out-Passow Passow, making their work an avowedly historical lexicon: “Our Plan has been that marked out and begun by Passow, viz. to make each Article a History of the usage of the word referred to.” It was a much larger task than they had expected when they agreed to the project, and finding the time for the work was difficult. Through a decade’s labor, Liddell and Scott “had only spare hours to bestow.”11 Every evening at seven o’clock, Scott would walk from Balliol, along the Cornmarket and St. Aldate’s, to Christ Church, where the two of them would work together.
Their Greek–English Lexicon finally appeared in 1843. Its definitions are sound, and the book gives full expositions of all the subtle shades of meaning. The dictionary is especially strong in providing cross-references from irregular forms to the proper entries. Most important, everything is based on actual literature: Liddell and Scott often provided full quotations from actual Greek literature, from the eleventh century B.C.E. into the Hellenistic period. The erudition can be intimidating:
Τρπους, ποδος, ὁ, ἡ, -πουν, τό, (τρι-, πούς) three-footed, three-legged or with three feet: and so—I. measuring three feet, τρ. τὸ ευρος, Hdt. 3, 60.—II. going on three feet, proverb. of an old man who leans on a staff, τρποδας ὁδοὺς στεχει, Aesch. Ag. 80; cf. τριτοβάμων, and see the Sphinx’s riddle in Argum. Soph. O. T.: hence—2. usu. as subst., τρπους, ὁ, a tripod, a three-footed brass kettle, Il. 18, 344, sq., Od. 8, 434, etc.; τρπους ἐμπυριβήτης, Il. 23, 702; so, τρ. ἀμφπυρος, Soph. Aj. 1405:—besides these we hear of τρ. ἄπυροι, vessels untouched by fire, which seem to have been of fine workmanship, used only for ornament, Il. 9, 122, 264, cf. 18, 373, sq., Paus. 4, 32, 1. In Hom., tripods are often given as prizes, Il. 11, 700; 23, 264, 485, etc.; also as gifts of honour, Il. 8, 290, Od. 13, 13. In aftertimes, tripods of fine workmanship, bearing inscriptions, were placed as votive gifts in the temples, esp. in that of Apollo at Dephi; these were then called τρ. ἀναθηματικο, Δελφικο, and were sometimes of precious metals, even gold, Hdt. 8, 82, Ar. Plut. 9, Thuc. 1, 132, Paus. 10, 13, 9, cf. Dict. Antiqq.:—hence, a street of Athens adorned with these gifts was called ο Τρποδες, Paus. 1, 20, 1.—III. any thing with three legs, generally, a three-legged table, etc., Xen. An. 7, 3, 21:—esp. the stool of the Delphic priestess, Eur. Ion 91, Or. 163, etc.; proverb, ὡς ἐκ τρποδος λέγειν, i. e. authoritatively, Ath. 37 fin.
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 FRANCIS PASSOW.’ 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.
