You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf From Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia

by Jack Lynch

  Liddell and Scott drew a sharp line between the lexical and the encyclopedic, and they stayed firmly on the lexical side. Others, though, sought to illuminate the ancient world in more wide-ranging works.

  William Smith, an Englishman, knew that “scarcely a single subject included under the general name of Greek and Roman Antiquities … has not received elucidation from the writings of the modern scholars of Germany.”15 He therefore planned to collect the latest in German antiquarian knowledge, scattered through many learned volumes, and to bring it together in a one-volume compendium suited to the needs of students. It would come with citations to the best modern scholarship that would allow the more diligent students to follow the leads. His Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities appeared in 1842.

  The most extensive treatment the classical world has ever received, though, followed not long after. Like Liddell and Scott’s Lexicon, it began as a revised version of something that already existed. August Friedrich Pauly started publishing his German encyclopedia of the classical world in 1837, and though Pauly died young, his work was completed and supplemented by Wilhelm Siegmund Teuffel and Christian Waltz as the Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft in alphabetischer Ordnung (Encyclopedia of Classical Knowledge in Alphabetical Order, 6 vols. in 9 parts) in 1852.16 But Pauly’s work was superseded by a French Dictionnaire des antiquités grecques et romaines (1873–1919), and it would hardly be remembered today but for a successor, Georg Wissowa, who was not even born when Pauly died. Wissowa was the main force behind a revised version of Pauly, known today as Pauly-Wissowa.

  The revised version fills an entire bookcase and then some. Though it was begun at the end of the nineteenth century, it is still essential for anyone interested in ancient Greece or Rome. The German word Altertumswissenschaft gives some idea of the book’s scope: it means “knowledge of ancient times,” and anything at all related to antiquity—history, literature, drama, clothing, food, philosophy, numismatics, military tactics, language, architecture—was included. It was cultural studies applied to the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome. The learning manages to be both dense and wide-ranging, as in this entry on Draco:

  7)Δράκων, Serpens, Anguis, large constellation in the northern hemisphere, see S t e r n b i l d e r. The mythological D. was regarded as the dragon who guarded the apples of Hesperides and, after Heracles killed him, was placed in the sky by Hera or Zeus. According to Pherecydes (see frg. 33), the Earth gave the golden apples to Zeus and Hera at their wedding, and Hera planted them in the garden of the gods, near Atlas. But since the Hesperides always picked the apples, Hera placed the dragon to guard the garden (Eratosth. Catast. 3. Hyg. astr. II 3. Schol. Arat. 45. Schol. Germ. BP 60, 7ff. G 116, 21. S 117, 1ff., s. H e s p e r i d e n). The dragon is in conjunction with the nearby constellation of Heracles (ὁ ʾΕνγόνασιν), who, placed by Zeus among the stars, places his foot on the D.’s head (Eratosth. 4. Hyg. astr. II 6. Schol. Arat. 74. Schol. Germ. BP 61, 3ff. G 118, 18ff. S 118, 2ff.; on the relationship between Eratosth. 3 and 4 see O l i v i e r i I catasterismi di Eratostene, S.-A. in Stud. ital. di filol. class. V 1ff.). There were a number of other interpretations. Either the D. was the Python’s dragon (ὡς δὲ ὁ πολὺς λόγος, ὁ πὸ ʾΑπόλλωνος ἀναιρεθες Πύθων), or the dragon killed by Cadmus (Schol. Arat. 45), or a dragon that Athena, in a fight with the giant Mimas, threw into the sky, where he still slithers (Hyg. astr. II 3. Schol. Germ. BP 60, 15ff.). According to a Cretan myth, Zeus, to escape the persecutions of his father Kronos, changed himself into a snake and his attendants into she-bears. When he later took charge, he immortalized this event in the stars (Schol. Arat. 46). Finally, it could be the snake that Dionysus led as a sign of the shield and placed in the sky as a token of the virginity of Chalcomede (Nonn. Dionys. XXV 402ff. XXXIII 370ff.).

  TITLE: Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft: Unter Mitwirkung zahlreicher Fachgenossen: Hrsg. von Georg Wissowa

  COMPILER: August Pauly (1796–1845), Wilhelm Siegmund Teuffel (1820–78), and Georg Otto August Wissowa (1859–1931)

  ORGANIZATION: Alphabetical, Aal to Zythos

  PUBLISHED: Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, then Druckenmüller, 1893–1980

  VOLUMES: 83 + 15 vols. supplement

  PAGES: 68,000

  ENTRIES: 15,334

  TOTAL WORDS: 55 million

  SIZE: 10″ × 7½″ (25 × 19 cm)

  TOTAL AREA: 35,000 sq. ft. (3,230 m2)

  WEIGHT: 202 lb.; 285 lb. with supplements (91.8 kg; 130 kg with supplements)

  LATEST EDITION: Der neue Pauly: Enzyklopädie der Antike: Altertum, ed. Hubert Cancik and Helmuth Schneider (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1996–2003), 16 vols. in 19

  The major characters behind Pauly-Wissowa were great scholars, but neither lived an especially interesting life. Pauly was a classical philologist, educated at the University of Tübingen, then and now one of the most prestigious universities in Germany. He spent most of his career teaching Greek and Latin literature at the Gymnasium in Stuttgart and died in 1845 just shy of his forty-ninth birthday. Georg Wissowa was born in 1859 in Wrocław, in what is now Poland, and attended the local university. He landed a job as a classical philologist at the University of Marburg, where he specialized in Roman religion. He was known in his time for revising another reference book, Theodor Mommsen’s Handbuch der römischen Alterthümer (Manual of Roman Antiquities).

  The original idea for a revised Pauly came from a scholar named Otto Crusius, but Crusius quickly changed his mind and relinquished the task to Wissowa, who declared his intention to produce a wholly new work, not merely a light revision. The plan was for a work in ten volumes in as many years. The story should be familiar by now: it wound up in ninety-eight volumes in nearly as many years. Wissowa, who lived to be seventy-one, died as the encyclopedia had reached M, and after his death the editorship passed to a series of philologists: Wilhelm Kroll, Karl Mittelhaus, Konrat Ziegler, Hans Gärtner. Inevitably a work published over several decades will be inconsistent, and that is true of Pauly-Wissowa. New scholarly discoveries make their appearance, and shifting scholarly interests and fashions give the volumes slightly different characters. Some scholars have noted hints of Nazi ideology in the volumes from the 1930s and ’40s, followed by a shift away from those principles after the Second World War came to an end. The project was finally completed in 1980.

  The reviews, which began appearing shortly after the first volume was published in 1894, were not so much glowing as awestruck. Many were amazed at the breadth of the coverage. As one early reviewer pointed out, “it includes all the names of persons of any historical importance whatsoever”—so, for instance, we get more than a hundred people named Alexandros and 127 named Annius.17 But it had depth as well as breadth, and the real strength of Pauly-Wissowa shows up in the long entries—extended essays, some dozens of pages long, signed by the contributors, with extensive references to the scholarly literature. The article for princeps occupied thirteen columns of small type; Praxiteles filled twenty-three; praetor twenty-seven; prähistorische Kulturen ninety-eight. Praefectus took up ninety columns in the main alphabetical sequence, with another eighty-eight in the supplement at the end of the volume.

  The encyclopedia’s greatest virtue was the quality of the scholarship. The specialized knowledge in every one of the subjects it covered—military history, literature, philology, archaeology, monumental inscriptions, even the history of agriculture—was greater than what had appeared in any comparable reference work before.18 Modern encyclopedias are collaborative endeavors, and editors work to line up contributors in various areas of expertise. Getting the best person for every article is difficult, and editors often have to settle for someone who is merely good enough. Wissowa, though, somehow managed to get the best people in the field, or, more accurately, fields. He initially signed up 119 experts, mostly German university professors, but as the work stretched out over multiple gene
rations, more signed on, and the roster became more international. Eventually 1,096 contributors pitched in. The result is the first port of call for anyone working on the Greek or Roman world.

  Both works discussed in this chapter have had significant afterlives. The first edition of Liddell and Scott appeared in 1843; today, in its ninth edition (1925–40), it remains the authoritative work in the field. Its three versions—the abridged edition, the intermediate edition without citations, and the unabridged edition—are known affectionately as the “Little Liddell,” the “Middle Liddell,” and the “Great Scott.”

  But much has happened over the decades: new texts and unknown words have turned up in manuscripts and inscriptions, and new research has revealed word origins unsuspected by earlier generations. A new definitive take on Greek is needed, and it is coming in the form of the Diccionario Griego–Español (DGE) being developed at the Instituto de Lenguas y Culturas del Mediterráneo y Oriente Próximo at Madrid’s Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales. When complete, the DGE will be three times the length of Liddell and Scott, with an even broader scope, taking in some of the earliest Greek writings from Mycenae as well as the Christian Church Fathers. It will also be more open to encyclopedic information by including personal names and place names. Volume 1 appeared in 1980, covering the alphabet from a to alla, and volume 7 (ekpelleuo–exauos) arrived in 2009.

  Pauly-Wissowa, too, has been both abridged and revisited. Between 1964 and 1975 a Kleine Pauly (small Pauly) appeared in five volumes, mostly an abridgment of the Real-Encyklopädie but with updates to some of the older entries. But the more significant work is the Neue Pauly (new Pauly), eighteen volumes published between 1996 and 2003, with twelve supplementary volumes between 2004 and 2012. While this work was inspired by Pauly-Wissowa and written in the same tradition, the scholarship was original and reflected the latest thinking in the study of antiquity. The new version appeared in two independent alphabetical sections, one covering “Antiquity” and the other the “Classical Tradition.” An English version, Brill’s New Pauly, was published in twenty-eight volumes between 2002 and 2014.

  CHAPTER 17 ½

  LOST PROJECTS

  What Might Have Been

  Many ancient books have disappeared. Seven plays each by Aeschylus and Sophocles have survived, and eighteen or nineteen by Euripides. But Aeschylus is believed to have written between seventy and ninety plays; Sophocles wrote more than a hundred, and Euripides had ninety-five to his credit. The others are lost, presumably forever. The same fate has befallen many early reference books. Verrius Flaccus wrote On the Meaning of Words early in the first century C.E.; only a later summary survives. Cato the Censor’s encyclopedia, compiled around 158 B.C.E., is gone leaving hardly a trace, as is Marcus Terentius Varro’s Disciplines. Only the medical parts of A. Cornelius Celsus’s encyclopedia survive. The first known Chinese encyclopedia, Huang Ian, written around the year 220 C.E., has vanished.

  The survival rate is better in the medieval world, though many reference books celebrated in their time have never been seen today. The Hortus deliciarum (Garden of Delights) was composed in the twelfth century by Herrad of Landsberg, the abbess of Hohenburg. The original manuscript was beautifully illustrated in color, and the book survived intact for seven centuries. But when the Prussians besieged Strasbourg in August 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War, fire destroyed both the city’s Museum of Fine Arts and its Municipal Library, where the Hortus had been kept. We know of its contents only from earlier lithographic reproductions, but the glorious colors of the original are lost.1 Fire also did in what would have been a magnificent Czech lexicon. Jan Ámos Komenský, or Comenius, an important Moravian humanist and educator, began work on his Linguae Bohemicae thesaurus in 1612, while he was still a student, and spent forty years on it. But it was burned to ashes during the Habsburg occupation of the town of Leszno during the Swedish-Polish War in 1656.

  Water has been equally damaging. Louis de Jaucourt worked for almost twenty years on a six-volume folio medical dictionary. In 1750, nearing the finish line, he was negotiating with a Dutch publisher to bring the book out. He had the manuscript carefully packed in a box and sent on a ship from Rouen to Amsterdam—but the ship sank to the bottom of the sea somewhere off the Dutch coast, taking the only copy of his work with it. Recognizing that it was too late to start again from scratch, he turned to the editors of L’Encyclopédie and offered his services there.2

  Probably the most painful loss the world of reference books has ever suffered is the Yonglè dàdian, also called the Yongle Encyclopedia. This king-sized work was ordered by the Emperor Cheng Zu and carried out at the Wen Yuan Pavilion in the imperial library. When the encyclopedia was completed in 1407 it occupied 22,937 scrolls in 11,095 books. In the sixteenth century, prudence dictated that a copy be made, so in 1567 a team set to work transcribing it—by which time something like 10 percent of the original work had gone missing. That original has now disappeared entirely, and no one knows what happened to it. Even the backup copy has suffered serious indignities. In the nineteenth century, the English and French visited China as part of their imperial projects and thought it reasonable to take pieces of the encyclopedia home as souvenirs. A fire wiped out eight hundred volumes. By 1875, less than half of the original work survived; by 1894, just 7 percent; and today, less than 4 percent.3

  But every so often we get lucky, and a long-lost work turns up. James Boswell, famous as Samuel Johnson’s biographer, worked in the 1760s on a Scottish dictionary. “The Scottish language is being lost every day,” he lamented in his diary, “and in a short time will become quite unintelligible… . To me, who have the true patriotic soul of an old Scotsman, that would seem a pity. It is for that reason that I have undertaken to make a dictionary of our tongue.”4 But no such dictionary had ever been published, and even the discovery of tens of thousands of pages of Boswell’s manuscripts in the 1920s produced nothing lexicographical. Critics assumed Boswell never made much progress on his dictionary, or, if he did, it had been destroyed, but it was hiding in plain sight all along, on the shelves of one of the world’s great libraries. Some unknown owner in the late eighteenth or nineteenth century bound the unpublished manuscript with John Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language—a published Scottish dictionary sharing a binding with an unpublished Scottish dictionary—and when Oxford University’s Bodleian Library bought the volume, they cataloged it only under Jamieson’s name, convinced the manuscript was his. Boswell’s work sat undetected until in 2010 lexicographer Susan Rennie, pursuing research on Jamieson in Oxford, discovered the handwritten material and began to suspect it was not Jamieson’s. After consulting Boswell experts, she was able to confirm that the long-neglected manuscript was the work begun in the 1760s.

  CHAPTER 18

  WORDS TELLING THEIR OWN STORIES

  The Historical Dictionaries

  Matthias de Vries

  Woordenboek der Nederlandsche taal

  1882–1998

  Sir James A. H. Murray

  The Oxford English Dictionary

  1884–1928

  The Grimms showed the lexicographical world what a dictionary could be: a monumental work of scholarship, surveying the whole of a language’s literary inheritance and providing a historical account of its development. But the Deutsches Wörterbuch, though 34,000 pages and the work of a century and a half, is neither the largest nor the slowest of the great dictionaries.

  The Woordenboek der Nederlandsche taal, the historical dictionary of the Dutch language, is called the longest dictionary in the world. The Deutsches Wörterbuch was its most important inspiration, but whereas the Grimms were seeking to establish a national identity, Dutch lexicographers were self-consciously dealing with an international language. Dutch is spoken in both the Netherlands and the Flemish parts of Belgium, two countries that had once been part of a United Kingdom of the Netherlands. With the Belgian Revolution of the 1830s, though, what had been the Southern Net
herlands became a new nation-state, Belgium. The Woordenboek is often identified with an “integrationist” movement, an attempt to create an international version of the language. Both nations provided financial support for the project.

  People had been lamenting the lack of a reliable Dutch dictionary since the early eighteenth century, and the moaning grew louder in the nineteenth.1 The plan to publish a dictionary arose at the first Nederlandsch Congres, an annual gathering of Dutch-speaking linguists that alternated its meetings between the Netherlands and Belgium. The meeting that began on August 26, 1849, was hosted by the University of Ghent in Belgium, where Gerth van Wijk of the Netherlands urged a dictionary “for our common tongue.” It would eventually become the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche taal, or WNT. After a year’s preparation, the 1850 congress—this time in Amsterdam—made it official: Matthias de Vries was to be the editor.

  TITLE: Woordenboek der Nederlandsche taal

  COMPILER: Matthias de Vries (1820–92)

  ORGANIZATION: Alphabetical, a to zythum

  PUBLISHED: ’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff & Sdu, 1882–1998

  VOLUMES: 40 + 3 vols. supplement

  PAGES: 45,805; 49,255 including supplements

  ENTRIES: 375,000

  TOTAL WORDS: 36.6 million; 39.4 million including supplements

  SIZE: 10¼″ × 6½″ (26 × 16.5 cm)