One sign that a book has literary value is that it can be read in a number of different ways. […]. For a desert island, one would choose a good dictionary rather than the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable, for, in relation to its readers, a dictionary is absolutely passive and may legitimately be read in an infinite number of ways.
W. H. Auden, ‘Prologue: Reading’, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays.
Aficionados of ancient and modern lexicography will react with justified perplexity at this quote, which in one way or another perpetuates the cliché that portrays lexicography as a form of dull and anodyne compilation. That this is incorrect will be apparent to anybody who has ever dealt with ancient (and modern) lexica or reflected about the principles of lexicography.[1] The Atticist lexica are a case in point. They are typically a product of 2nd-century-CE culture. In line with the literary taste of the Second Sophistic, they aimed to provide people who aspired at speaking and writing in an elegantly polished Greek with practical indications on how to avoid contemporary koine usages, which were perceived as lacking in prestige and ‘purity’ and reflecting the decadence of post-classical Greek. Therefore, these lexica taught how to model one’s language and style after a canon of distinguished 5th- and 4th-century Athenian writers whose language was approved by the lexicographers. This operation might sound unproblematic, but it is not. Atticist lexica are permeated by a polemical spirit and often disagree about what is ‘good’ Attic and which authors are worthy of being admitted into the canon as models of ‘pure’ language.
The so-called Antiatticist, the subject of Fiori’s book, is one of the most important 2nd-century-CE Atticist lexica. It is preserved, in heavily epitomised form, only in the lexicographical miscellany contained in cod. Par. Coisl. 345, where it appears under the inscriptio ἄλλος ἀλφάβητος (‘Another alphabetic [lexicon]’) without any indication of its author and original title.[2] The most evident feature of the Antiatticist is that the compiler admitted into the canon a number of Musterautoren who were normally avoided by Atticist lexicographers, either because they were important but did not write in Attic (e.g., Herodotus, Pindar, Epicharmus) or because their language was dangerously close to the koine (e.g., Xenophon, the poets of Middle and New Comedy). The 18th-century Dutch scholar David Ruhnken, who first devoted attention to this lexicon, immediately recognised these features and coined the name Antiatticist for its unknown compiler.[3] After Immanuel Bekker’s 1814 editio princeps (included in Anecdota Graeca), the Antiatticist attracted relatively limited interest, but important progress was made. Two contributions stand out. Kurt Latte’s 1915 influential article ‘Zur Zeitbestimmung des Antiatticista’ investigated the Antiatticist’s dependance on Aristophanes of Byzantium’s On Words Suspected of Not Being Used by the Ancients and showed that the Antiatticist is to be dated between the publication of book one and two of Phrynichus’ Eclogue; thus, the Antiatticist belongs to the second half of the 2nd century CE, the time when the Atticist debate was most intense.[4] Stefano Valente’s authoritative edition of the Antiatticist appeared in 2015.[5] It is provided with a detailed introduction, a very reliable new critical text, and extensive critical and exegetical apparatuses and is now the point of reference for any work on this lexicon. But despite these and other scholars’ achievements, working on the Antiatticist remains challenging. Due to its heavily epitomised text and the laconic format, it is difficult not just to interpret its entries, but also to reconstruct the Atticist theorisation which inspired the compilation of this lexicon.
The book under review does an excellent job of showing how some of these challenges can be addressed with a comprehensive and sound approach focusing on parts of the lexicon. The book is a revised version of Simone Fiori’s 2020 MA dissertation defended at the University of Genoa. The aim of this work is to collect and comment on all the quotations from Aristophanes contained in the Antiatticist.[6] The book’s structure is straightforward. After the general index, the list of abbreviations and symbols, and a short preface, there occurs a detailed Introduction (pp. 13–30), which sets out inspiration, aims, and results of this research. The main body of the book is arranged into 23 units. Each of these is devoted to the collection and analysis of all the entries of the Antiatticist which discuss materials taken from the same Aristophanic play; thus, for instance, unit 1 is organised into two sub-units, 1.1 and 1.2, which discuss respectively Antatt. ο 16 Valente (dealing with ὄστινα in Ar. Ach. 863) and Antiatt. ε 130 Valente (dealing with ἐξάλειπτρον in Ar. Ach. 1063).[7] The book ends with a 30-page bibliography and three commendably detailed indices (Greek words, passages, subjects).
The book’s unpretentious title does not do justice to its ambitious aims and conceals the fact that its scope is not limited to investigating the reception of Aristophanes in later periods. Carrying out research on the Aristophanes quotations in the Antiatticist contributes towards improving our understanding of how the compilation of this lexicon was conceived. As mentioned above, the Antiatticist adopts a less rigidly classicising approach to the canon. However, the aims of this lexicon remain somewhat elusive. Did it simply espouse a milder form of Atticism, but well within the boundaries and prerogatives of Atticist lexicography? Or did it pursue a polemical, anomalistic, even anti-puristic, approach, as many entries suggest? Choosing Aristophanes as a test case helps shed light on these questions. Since Aristophanes is an undisputed keystone of the Atticist canon of any lexicon, exploring how materials from his plays are treated in the Antiatticist helps understand to what extent and how the Antiatticist differs from other Atticist lexica. The introduction to Fiori’s book provides a useful overview of these issues and what the book achieves in relation to them. Fiori shows that the Antiatticist largely treats Aristophanes in a similar way to other Atticist lexica and stresses in particular the entries where the doctrines of the Antiatticist agree with those of Phrynichus (who is generally agreed to be the most rigid of the Atticist lexicographers, championing the narrowest canon of Musterautoren). In light of this, Fiori invites us to reconsider, or at least maintain with nuance, the view that Antiatticist is a programmatically ‘anti-puristic’ lexicon.[8] Instead, laying emphasis on the inspiration which the Antiatticist received from Aristophanes of Byzantium’s On Words Suspected of Not Being Used by the Ancients, Fiori’s work ends with the balanced conclusion that the aim of the Antiatticist was to bear witness to a broader spectrum of stages in the history of Greek, and so the polemical approach is targeted not at Atticism per se, but at the lexicographers who approved of a very restrictive canon of Attic writers.[9]
Naturally, the commentary on the entries of the Antiatticist is varied, depending on the textual and exegetical problems posed by each entry.[10] A strength of Fiori’s approach is that it is consistent, avoiding the risk that the book would look like a series of unconnected items. First, Fiori collects and discusses a wealth of parallel entries from other ancient lexica and works of erudition which can be fruitfully compared to the entries of the Antiatticist. In the entries discussing materials taken from Aristophanes’ surviving plays (Units 1–10), the attention that Fiori pays to analysing the context in which the form or construction discussed by the Antiatticist occurs is commendable; in the entries discussing materials from Aristophanes’ fragmentary plays (Units 11-23), it is good that Fiori offers some suggestions as to the possible contexts where the forms discussed may originally have occurred. Throughout the book, Fiori examines in detail the textual difficulties raised by the entries of the Antiatticist, sometimes contributing towards a better understanding of the received text (e.g., at pp. 234–236), and also by the transmission of Aristophanes’ plays and fragments (for instance by offering a new conjecture on Ar. fr. 648 on pp. 259–267, which, if not irresistible, has diagnostic value). It is of great value that the commentary examines the entries of this lexicon from every possible point of view (the treatment of ἀλετρίβανον at pp. 80–98 is most instructive), addressing not only linguistic issues (e.g., also taking into consideration the interference of Latin, see the analysis of -αριον vis-à-vis –ārium at pp. 204–210),[11] but also the difficulties posed by the exegesis of the sources (e.g., the discussion of βαλανεύω at pp. 122–131). Fiori’s discussion is informative, and the exposition is clear. The book is also written in an elegantly animated style, which livens up the study of these complicated texts.[12]
To conclude, this book is a welcome contribution to the study of Greek lexicography. It will make fruitful reading for scholars interested in the history of the Greek language, in ancient Greek lexicography, philology, and erudition, and in Greek comedy.
Notes
[1] See the introduction to J. Chadwick, Lexicographica Graeca, Oxford 2007 and now especially C. Stray, M. Clarke, J. T. Katz, Liddell and Scott. The History, Methodology, and Languages of the World’s Leading Lexicon of Ancient Greek, Oxford and New York 2019. See also H. Meschonnic, Des mots et des mondes, Paris 1991, 16: ‘Dictionnaires, encyclopédies, grammaires sont donc à merveille les lieux où lire entre les lignes, où reconnaitre, plus facilement qu’ailleurs, les conflits, les masquages des conflits, les clichés qui font l’album de la famille d’une culture’.
[2] Materials from this lexicon also entered the tradition of the Συναγωγὴ λέξεων χρησίμων, through which they are also to be found in the lexica which depend on the Συναγωγή.
[3] Antiatticist is now used as the name of the compiler and as the name of the work (i.e., Antiatticist; see also Fiori at p. 16 n. 6).
[4] Hermes 50, 1915, 373–394.
[5] The Antiatticist. Introduction and Critical Edition, Berlin and Boston 2015.
[6] Fiori included only the entries which contain an explicit reference to Aristophanes or his plays (with one partial exception, see below).
[7] Unit 22 is devoted to the entry of the Antiatticist which contains an Aristophanic fragment incertae sedis. Unit 23 is devoted to an entry of the Antiatticist which must go back to Aristophanic materials even though Aristophanes’ name does not occur in the received text of the lexicon (but it is rightly restored by Stefano Valente in his edition based on the indirect tradition of the entry, i.e., Phot. β 325 Theodoridis; this seems an unnecessary complication, and Fiori could simply have included this entry in unit 22).
[8] This view has been repeatedly advocated in recent scholarship (see, e.g., Valente [n. 5], 43–44 and O. Tribulato, ‘(En)listing the Good Authors: The Defence of Greek Linguistic Variety in the Antiatticist Lexicon’, in R. Laemmle et al. (eds.), Lists and Catalogues in Ancient Literature and Beyond. Towards a Poetics of Enumeration, Berlin and Boston 2021, 169–194).
[9] In line with previous scholars (see, e.g., n. 8), Fiori compares the approach of the Antiatticist with Pollux’ Onomasticon.
[10] E.g., the analysis of ἀλετρίβανον occupies pp. 80–98 and touches on a variety of topics, while that of παραχορδίζω only pp. 166–167.
[11] Occasionally, the bibliographic coverage could have been more thorough: e.g., the results of the discussion of ἤνεγκον/ἤνεγκα in tragedy and comedy at pp. 142–147 had already been reached by a classical study like O. Lautensach, Die Aoriste bei den attischen Tragikern und Komikern, Göttingen 1911, 101–107 (see also A. Willi, The Languages of Aristophanes. Aspects of Linguistic Variation in Classical Attic Greek, Oxford 2003, 249).
[12] In terms of typographical setting, I only have a major reservation concerning the fact that the quotations from Aristophanes are centered rather than indented and justified. The result is unpleasant and confusing.