Volume 1

A Greek-English lexicon / compiled by Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott.

  • Liddell, Henry George, 1811-1898.
Date:
©1940, [1976]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A Greek-English lexicon / compiled by Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    11/1078
    v Some five years later the Delegates of the Clarendon Press were invited to consider the revision of the Lexicon with a view to the incorporation of the rapidly growing material supplied by newly discovered texts on stone and papyrus, for which room might be found by the adoption of more compendious methods of reference; and a conference took place in March 1903, for which Ingram Bywater prepared a memorandum on the projected revision, advice being sought from Henry Jackson, Sir Richard Jebb, J. E. B. Mayor, and Arthur Sidgwick. The Delegates received the project favourably and it was hoped that Mr. Sidgwick might be able to act as editor. Contributions were invited in his name and a fair amount of material was collected, including a large number of notes and suggestions by Professor Leeper of Melbourne. Amongst other English and American scholars whose contributions were of considerable extent may be named the Rev. M. A. Bayfield and Prof. C. J. Goodwin, and particularly Mr. Herbert W. Greene, of whose services to the Lexicon more will be said presently. Mr. Sidgwick was, however, prevented by his duties as a teacher and afterwards by the failure of his health from commencing the work of revision. In the meantime two more ambitious schemes had been initiated. At the second general assembly of the International Association of Academies, held in London in May 1904, Sir Richard Jebb submitted on behalf of the British Academy a scheme for the compilation of a new Thesaurus of Ancient Greek up to the early part of the seventh century a.d. ; and after a discussion in which the difficulty and magnitude of the enterprise were emphasized1 a Committee of Inquiry, consisting of Sir R. C. Jebb, Pro¬ fessors Diels, Gomperz, Heiberg, Krumbacher, Leo, and M. Perrot, with power to co-opt, was appointed to consider method, means, and preliminary questions in connexion with the proposal. In 1905 Prof. P. Kretschmer was added to the Committee, which drafted a memorandum on the question of establishing a periodical ‘Archiv’ and an office for the collection of slips. At the close of the year Jebb, who had acted as Chairman, died, and was replaced in 1906 by Gomperz, while Bywater was added to the Committee, which, at a meeting held at Vienna in May, decided to constitute itself a permanent and independent body. The difficulties of the project had been incisively stated by Diels in an article published in the Neue Jahrbucher for 1905,2 in the course of which he wrote as follows: Any one who bears in mind the bulk of Greek literature, which is at least 10 times as great [as that of Latin], its dialectical variations, its incredible wealth of forms, the obstinate persistence of the classical speech for thousands of years down to the fall of Constantinople, or, if you will, until the present day : who knows, moreover, that the editions of almost all the Greek classics are entirely unsuited for the purposes of slipping, that for many important writers no critical editions whatever exist: and who considers the state of our collections of fragments and special Lexica, will see that at the present time all the bases upon which a Greek Thesaurus could be erected are lacking. But even if we were to assume that we possessed such editions and collections from Homer down to Nonnus, or (as Krumbacher proposed in London) down to Apostolius, and further that they had all been worked over, slipped, or excerpted by a gigantic staff of scholars, and that a great house had preserved and stored the thousands of boxes, whence would come the time, money, and power to sift these millions of slips and to bring Νους into this Chaos ? Since the proportion of Latin to Greek Literature is about x : 10, the office work of the Greek Thesaurus would occupy at least 100 scholars. At their head there would have to be a general editor, who, however, would be more of a general than an editor. And if this editorial cohort were really to perform its task punctually, and if the Association of Academies, which, as is well known, has not a penny of its own, were to raise the ten million marks necessary for the completion of (say) 120 volumes; and if scholars were to become so opulent that they could afford to purchase the Thesaurus Graecus for (say) 6,000 marks—how could one read and use such a monstrosity ? 1 Krumbacher was anxious to include Byzantine Greek in the ambit of the new Thesaurus. 2 p. 692; Diels had already expressed his views in his Elementum (1899), p. ix sqq.