The Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek

By

Franco Montanari

Editors of the English Edition

Madeleine Goh & Chad Schroeder

under the auspices of the

Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University

Advisory Editors

Gregory Nagy

Leonard Muellner

BRILL

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover designed by André van der Waal, Remco Mulckhuyse, and Joël Comvalius at Coördesign.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015942362

isbn 978-90-04-19318-5 (hardback)

Copyright 1995 Loescher Editore—Torino (Italia)

Copyright 2004 Loescher Editore—Torino (Italia)—Second edition with CD-ROM

Copyright 2013 Loescher Editore—Torino (Italia)—Third edition with CD-ROM

Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands (English).

Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, and Hotei Publishing.

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Translators

Rachel Barritt-Costa

Michael Chappell

Michael Chase

Ela Harrison

Patrick Paul Hogan

Jared Hudson

Sergio Knipe

Peter Mazur

Serena Perrone

Chad Schroeder

Chris Welser

Proofreaders

Mike Chappell

Ela Harrison

Patrick Paul Hogan

Davide Muratore

Preface

The history of dictionaries of Ancient Greek rests on a venerable and multifaceted tradition, which over the centuries has led dictionaries themselves to assume strikingly different forms. We have testimonies from as far back as the fifth century BC, telling of Athenian boys intent on understanding and translating Homer at school. At that time, translating the language in which the lines of poems such as the Iliad and the Odyssey were written—an unfamiliar language far-removed from the customary linguistic forms—basically meant setting up a correspondence between an ancient Homeric word that was difficult to understand and was no longer in common use, and a word current in the Greek of the translator’s day, whose form was thus immediately recognizable in the contemporary user’s language. This was particularly true for Homer, the sacred text that formed the quintessence of the paideia, which always constituted the basis of schooling and higher education, but it was also true, for instance, of the fundamental legal texts, such as the authoritative laws of Solon. The process was thus a translation from one kind of Greek to another kind of Greek, in other words a translation into a different form of the same language—an operation that linguists call “intralingual translation”. The difficult words used above all in poetry needed an explanation, an equivalent ...