When at the age of about ten I began to show an interest in the ancient world, my father bought me a classical dictionary, “containing a copious account of all the proper names mentioned in ancient authors, with the value of coins, weights and measures used among the Greeks and Romans, and a chronological table.” The book bore no date, though the copy I was given had obviously been printed not long before, and it was not until much later that I discovered that it had first appeared in the year before the French Revolution. Its author, the Rev. John Lemprière, D.D., records the doings of characters of myth and history alike in the same ceremonious Gibbonian prose and in the same grave tones of judicious appraisal; Cyclops and Caligula, Priapus and Elagabalus, Medusa and Messalina seemed to inhabit the same world. Ancient biographies are nothing if not anecdotal; no less a person than Aristotle held that anecdote was illustrative of character, and this gave license to a horde of minor writers. Lemprière feasts his readers on the rich stores of ancient tittle-tattle. Aeschylus died when an eagle mistook his bald head for a rock and tried to crack on it the shell of a captured tortoise; Euripides was torn to pieces by raving dogs, just as his character Pentheus was torn to pieces by raving women; Lucretius, who concludes the fourth book of his poem with an attack on love, was poisoned by a love philter, and so on. Lemprière’s bibliography is that of his own time; he informs his readers that the best edition of Aeschylus is that of Thomas Stanley, published in 1663.

Fanciers of Lemprière usually turn first to his lives of the more outré Roman emperors and empresses. Caligula made his horse high priest and consul (in fact, he is said by two not entirely reliable historians to have planned the horse’s promotion), and constantly fed wild horses with human victims; the emperor “appeared in public places in the most indecent manner, committed incest with his three sisters, and established public places of prostitution.” The horse story, like the story that Nero “served one of his retainers as a catamite,” is told also of Elagabalus, who “was not satisfied with following the plain laws of nature.” “Few men at Rome,” Lemprière tells us, “could not boast of having enjoyed the favors of the impure Messalina”; in her time the population of Rome was already more than one million. I was delighted with the book, which was probably responsible for my becoming a classical scholar; I have heard that it had had the same effect on Housman. But it cannot be said to incorporate the results of the most recent research, so that a parent in my father’s situation would be unwise to present it to his child as an instrument of study.

What handbooks could one nowadays recommend to him? If one wants a biographical dictionary of the ancient world, Who Was Who in the Greek World and Who Was Who in the Roman World, both edited by Diana Bowder (1982), are very useful books, with good illustrations. If you want a general encyclopedia at an advanced level, and if you know German, there is Der kleine Pauly (1979), a condensation into five small volumes of the gigantic German encyclopedia of the ancient world in well over a hundred volumes, that is known as Pauly-Wissowa. But nothing seems to have come of the plan for an English version of this that was talked of some years ago; a new condensation on a much larger scale, called Der neue Pauly, will also exist only in German.

The most useful one-volume dictionary of the ancient world in English has for many years been the Oxford Classical Dictionary, whose first edition appeared in 1949, followed by the second in 1970. The new third edition, though, has been very largely rewritten, being 20 percent larger than its predecessor, and having more than eight hundred new entries. It is all written in the English language, but its 364 contributors are drawn not only from English-speaking countries, but from all countries where classical antiquity is studied. What the editors in their introduction call “a certain top-heaviness in favor of the purely literary aspects” of ancient culture has been effectively corrected; the new edition deals not only with literature but with archaeology, art, history, law, religion, philosophy, linguistics, science, and mathematics. It gives extended coverage to regions beyond the core areas of Greece and Italy, and to cultures which interacted with those of Greece and Rome. Eighteen “Area Advisors” are named as having been responsible for different aspects of ancient culture; for the most part these are noted experts. Much of the old dictionary has been preserved, but it has often been expanded and has been carefully brought up to date, with the addition of much valuable bibliography. With moving piety, Simon Hornblower, one of the two main editors and one of the leading modern experts on Thucydides, has retained what he calls a classic article on that writer by H. T. Wade-Gery. An article that I have always considered classic, that of J. D. Denniston on Greek meter, has been replaced by a new entry by one of the best modern authorities on the subject, Laetitia Parker; her article gives more information, but is more difficult for the comparative beginner. Professional scholars will find the book indispensable. But how will the book serve the general reader? Even the kind of reader for whom Lemprière would still serve well will find it more useful than any other modern work of the same kind in English that is known to me, provided he knows how to skip. But in some places the old dictionary was kinder to such a reader; some of its articles about poets show more feeling for the poetry than do their learned replacements. Some of the new ones fail in this respect; in particular, a disappointing treatment of Pindar gives one no idea of why he is considered a great poet—something I tried to explain in a lecture, which can be found in my book Greek in a Cold Climate (Barnes and Noble), not mentioned in the scrappy bibliography appended to the article in this book. The cultivated general reader needs a real classical dictionary, since he cannot rely on general encyclopedias for information about the ancient world; for example, the otherwise admirable Columbia Encyclopedia is in this department of knowledge deplorably inadequate.

The reader will wish to know how the dictionary handles certain topics now markedly fashionable and therefore often treated with rich absurdity. The Area Advisor responsible for “women’s studies,” Helen King, deserves credit for the sensible treatments of “women,” “gynecology,” “marriage,” “prostitution,” “hetairai,” and “pornography.” D. M. Halperin, writing on “homosexuality,” Amy Richlin on “sexuality,” and H. N. Porter on “heterosexuality,” rightly point out that the ancients classified sexual behavior as active or passive rather than as heterosexual or homosexual, so that the latter pair of terms are not strictly applicable, though Porter discreetly adds that “this remains controversial.” Though there are brief articles on Ethiopia and Nubia, there is, surprisingly, no article on blacks in the ancient world; the editors would have done well to secure a treatment of this topic by the leading modern authority, Frank M. Snowden, Jr., author of Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (1970, many times reprinted). This learned book is totally free from the kind of speculative matter written by people with a political agenda but small qualification to write about the ancient world. Such speculations have been conclusively refuted by Mary Lefkowitz in Not Out of Africa and by Lefkowitz and G. M. Rogers in Black Athena Revisited (both 1996).

One of the youngest Area Advisors, Emily Kearns (religion), has done a notably good job. I remarked with interest that the advisors for Latin literature were a husband and wife team, D. P. and P. G. Fowler. Not long ago, D. P. Fowler in the Times Literary Supplement made disparaging remarks about the younger generation of German classical scholars, causing me to reflect that I could think of a very fair number of young German classical scholars whose work, both in quality and quantity, seemed to me to stand up rather well to comparison with Dr. Fowler’s own production. These two scholars have contributed to the volume an account of “literary theory and classical studies,” which is one of the longest articles in the book; they offer “not so much a path through the minefield as a way in.” Traditional classical philology, they believe, “received its classic formulation” in 1872–3 from the twenty-four-year-old Wilamowitz in his pamphlets against Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. Wilamowitz’s essay was reprinted, together with the other contributions to the unedifying controversy which Nietzsche’s book provoked (the most moderate of the participants was Richard Wagner), in Karlfried Gründer’s Der Streit um Nietzsches “Geburt der Tragödie” (1969). Classical philology contains, the Fowlers sportingly allow, “much of which the discipline can be proud”; but they complain that it assumes  

the scientific objectivity of the critic, the focus on the surface psychology of the author, the belief that all “clues” will point to a single coherent picture, the aspiration to that overall master interpretation, and especially the belief that the hermeneutic tools used to interpret texts are timeless, based on the commonsense rules used in ordinary life.

With this they contrast theories which they classify as “foundational” or “methodological”; “the former tackle the basic assumptions of critical practice, … while the latter provide new things to do with texts rather than new reasons to do them.” They then describe the various types of theory--structuralism, narratology, “intertextuality” (Julia Kristeva, we learn, is the inventor of this unpleasing and unnecessary bit of jargon), poststructuralism, deconstruction, and postmodernism. “In a sense,” they remark, “there is no further step beyond post-modernism for criticism to take.” Just so; it has been said that “the modernist says that we can never get it right, but must go on trying, but the post-modernist just gives up.”

There is nothing new about postmodernism, which closely resembles the extreme skepticism, then called Pyrrhonism after the founder of the ancient school of Skeptics, which was in vogue for the half-century between the publication of Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique in 1695–7 and that of Montesquieu’s De l’Esprit des lois in 1748; Samuel Johnson and, at one stage, Voltaire both upheld it. Some people have accepted postmodernism on the ground that it leaves everyone free to write his own history; they should remember that then there is no reason why that history should be believed. The obvious objection to such a notion of personal narrative was briefly expressed by a speaker at a recent conference at the New York Academy of Sciences, who said, “Either Grant surrendered to Lee or Lee surrendered to Grant.” (For the proceedings of that conference, see The Flight from Science and Reason, edited by Paul R. Gross, Norman Levitt, and Martin W. Lewis [1996].)

The Fowlers go on to offer brief remarks about Marxism (leading up to Foucault, New Historicism, and Bakhtin), the use of psychoanalysis (from Freud to Lacan), and finally feminism. All these things they describe with a clarity notably absent from the writings of most proponents of such theories, so that the Fowlers’ article can save unbelievers from a large amount of trouble; for those to whom they have shown the way into the minefield, they have made it easier than most believers do to find the way out. Despite the Fowlers’ faith in modernity, they have also contributed to the book a good article on Lucretius and an article on Virgil that is respectable, though not as good as that of S. E. Hinds on Ovid.

---

---