Liddell & Scott: The History, Methodology, and Languages of the World's Leading Lexicon of Ancient Greek. Ed. by Christopher Stray, Michael Clarke, and Joshua T. Katz

Abstract

My modest grammar school had long been greekless, and Liddell & Scott gathered dust on a high shelf in the staff room. Now and again I glimpsed it from the corridor. One day I began to read Notre‐Dame de Paris, whose narrator says he found the gloomy word ANArKH engraved in an obscure corner of one of the cathedral towers. When I asked what this meant, our Latin teacher sent me to fetch Liddell & Scott. He knew the Greek alphabet just well enough to be able to find the correct entry. But the size, weight, and inaccessibility of the book matching the lofty and obscure location of that mysterious word, the baffling density of two thousand columns of tiny print in a language unintelligible even to a teacher of Latin—there and then I felt impelled to begin Greek. The volume under review, which stems from a conference held at Oxford in 2013, is concerned not so much with the awe‐inspiring monumentality of Liddell & Scott——as with the mechanics of its composition, the types of evidence used, the problems raised by a venture of this kind, and the question how else such material might best be arranged. The twenty‐ one essays are divided into four sections. The first deals with the history and constitution of the Lexicon. Christopher Stray briskly describes how the project began and shows how cost and problems of organization meant that subsequent revisions were never thorough enough.