Customer Reviews
Brilliant! - By: Demi Grammatopoulos, 18 Mar 2008 
Brilliantly authoritative & complete. If you are reading classical greek text, whether it's Homer, Sophocles, Plato or Hesiod, this should be your number one resource. With notes on dialects & text occurences, this reference is worth its weightin gold.
Fair as a star when only one/Is shining in the sky - By: DAVID BRYSON, 03 Feb 2005 
Dictionaries, however much we feel the need for them, always have to be handled with a certain amount of caution. Anyone involvedin the compilation of such a work of reference has to be a jack of rather too many trades for total reliability. In even the best modern English dictionaries the derivation of words can often be seen to be dubious or even plain wrong by someone who has the requisite academic linguistic grounding. Such a grounding is infrequent, those working on the chain-gangs producing the dictionary are often not aware that there is anything lacking, but the general public are prone to believe that everythingin so august a publication must flow directly from some fount of all wisdom & knowledge. Lewis & Short's Latin dictionary, the standard work of its kind for English-speaking readers of Latin, exhibits at one point the glaring & elementary error of stating that the feminine adjective Libyssa, Latinised from Greek, has some corresponding masculine formation Libyssus, & when I last saw the book nobody seemed to have picked the error up.
Greek itself is a bigger & more complex language than Latin, but the task of the lexicographer with Greek isin some ways easier. Greek is a much more self-contained language, although it was writtenin antiquityin a large variety of dialects, & the dialect that predominatesin its literature, the Attic dialect of Athens, isin many ways idiosyncratic & untypical. In compiling this volume the editors have decided, very reasonably, to include all vocabulary from Homer to the end of the Attic period, & also to include some important extras, notably words usedin the Koine of the New Testament. These days it is likely that the proportion of students of Greek who approach it with a view to studying scripture is higher than it was half a century & more ago,in proportion as traditional classical studies have declined. With thisin mind I started with a scriptural word, & I got an unpleasant shock. The word 'skarphos', the supposed 'mote'in someone's eyein Matthew, is not even there. I picked this word because skarphos means a stick, not a mote, & I had wished to see how the dictionary dealt with it. Not at all was the answer I got. I had better luck with a dozen or so other words, but evenin such a small set of searches I also found that the Grecised equivalent of the Latin coin a 'quadrans' is not there either.
The real reason for deficiencies of this kind is that the focus is strongly on Attic, & properly so when this work was put together a century & a quarter ago. They have a brave go at Homer, but some familiar old nonsense is still herein my pristine-quality new volume. Could you be capable of supposing that Homer talked about 'convoluted cows' or 'crumpled cows'? I thought not. Translating 'helikas bous' as 'cows with crumpled horns' may save embarrassment, but the Greek says nothing about horns. The ancient scholars told us that this 'helix' is a word meaning dark or black, coincidentalin form with the word for a whorl. They give no further explanation, but it certainly makes better sense to think of 'helikopes' when applied to the Achaeans as meaning 'dark eyed' & not some ludicrous image of them characterised by rolling their eyes, which is what the dictionary would have us believe. If the expression may be forgiven, I consider these poor crumpled cows to be my betes noires. They are just black cows, the poor things. Again, the reader of book IV of the Odyssey is brought up short at the end of the very first line with the adjective 'ketoessan' applied to Lacedaemon. I suppose it has to be translated as something, butin the first place the ancient commentators make no bones about it that the meaning of the word was long lost evenin their time, &in the second 'cavernous' is not even true.
If I seem to focus overly on shortcomings I would do the same with any other dictionary. Sometimes we know no better & have to trust the dictionary, but when we do know better there is no reason for superstitious awe. This book is an excellent practical solution to the unwieldy 2-volume format of the original Liddell & Scott. Some urges will just not be denied, & I simply have to read Greek again. I am encouraged & not a little excited at how wellin general my memory has retained my Greek over nearly half a century, & I have every confidencein the basic work of reference that I have just acquiredin this convenient shape & size.
