The Cambridge Greek Lexicon (CGL) is designed to replace the Oxford Intermediate Greek–English Lexicon (IGL; ‘Middle Liddell’) and to ‘meet the needs of modern students’ (p. vii). The CGL focuses on literary Greek up to the fourth century bce, with an ultimate cut-off in the second century ce. In that later period, it includes Hellenistic poetry, Gospels and Acts, Polybius and Plutarch's Lives. It excludes epigraphical evidence, documentary papyri, technical Greek (including Aristotle's), the Septuagint and Greek after the second century ce. Therefore, it is not a replacement for the 9th edition of the Greek–English Lexicon (LSJ; ‘Liddell and Scott’). As a replacement for the ‘Middle Liddell’, the CGL succeeds in every respect, except two: portability and price. There is now almost no reason to purchase the ‘Middle Liddell’. If portability and price are the primary concerns, the Logeion website (https://logeion.uchicago.edu/) cannot be beaten and is in many respects the most versatile lexicographical tool for scholars and students of ancient Greek and Latin alike. Although the short definitions in Logeion can be updated, the rest of the material reflects the often nineteenth-century origin of its dictionaries. The CGL meets needs of modern students primarily by updating the language in the translations.
This updating is most evident in the language for sexuality and sexual activity. Earlier dictionaries, including the 9th edition of LSJ (published in the 1940s), have long been characterised by a reticence to use coarse language for sexual words. The LSJ translates λαικάζω, for example, unhelpfully as ‘wench’. The LSJ supplement (1968) gives the more accurate, but still too Latinate ‘practice fellatio on’, a gloss that informs the Logeion short definition and the Brill translation of F. Montanari (Vocabolario della lingua greca [2013], itself based on the LSJ). The CGL defines it as ‘practice fellatio’, adding the vulgar translation: ‘suck cocks’. The new Lexicon has thus caught up with the Loeb Classical Library in translating sexual language into a modern vernacular. The CGL is not, of course, the first dictionary for students to do this. The Oxford Classical Greek Dictionary by J. Morwood and J. Taylor (2002) omits λαικάζω, but glosses βίνω with ‘fuck’. Aside from sexually coarse language, is the CGL as successful in updating the language in other areas? This review explores this question in entries related to women, race and ethnicity, where there is a risk of reproducing nineteenth-century racist and misogynist attitudes through anachronistic translation.
Parthenos (p. 1088) is difficult to translate into English. The entry begins with a discursive definition in Roman font, an excellent feature of this Lexicon, explaining that the word denotes ‘a social distinction (betw. unmarried and married) and not a biological one (betw. virgin and non-virgin: see section 4)’. The translations include:
1. Girl or maiden set in opposition to a wife
2. A daughter (i.e. ‘specific maiden’)
3. A maiden deity (Artemis or Athena are given as examples)
4. ‘Virgin (opp. a woman who has had sexual experience) … (ref. to a wife whose marriage is unconsummated)’.
This entry does a good job with a tricky word, where modern English lacks a translation that captures the Greek and where the options ‘maiden’ and ‘virgin’ are either obscure or misleading. One recommendation: we would have suggested in the definition that the critical distinction is between women who have had children and those who have not had a child (G. Sissa, ‘Maidenhood without Maidenhead: the Female Body in Ancient Greece’, in F. Zeitlin, J. Winkler and D. Halperin [edd.], Before Sexuality: the Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World [1990], pp. 339–64; S.L. James, ‘Case Study II: Sex and the Single Girl: the Cologne Fragment of Archilochus’, in S.L. James and S. Dillon [edd.], A Companion to Women in the Ancient World [2012], pp. 81–3).
Two other terms are worth considering: hetaira and pallake/pallakis. Scholars have discussed the term hetaira extensively since the 1990s (e.g. L. Kurke, ‘Inventing the “Hetaira”: Sex, Politics, and Discursive Conflict in Archaic Greece’, Classical Antiquity 16 [1997], 106–50; L. McClure, Courtesans at Table: Gender and Greek Literary Culture in Athenaeus [2003]; R.F. Kennedy, Immigrant Women in Athens: Gender, Ethnicity, and Citizenship in the Classical City [2014]; R.F. Kennedy, ‘Elite Citizen Women and the Origins of the Hetaira in Classical Athens’, Helios 42 [2015], 61–79), and the CGL reflects this scholarship. The ‘Middle Liddell’ translates it as ‘companion’ and ‘opp. to a lawful wife, a concubine, a courtesan, Hdt., Attic’. The CGL provides a more differentiated set of options, recognising friendship between women, objects like a lyre, romantic ‘girlfriend’, ‘mistress’ or ‘courtesan’. This last receives the further definition: ‘a woman engaged in an informal longer-term sexual relationship w. one man or several’ (p. 608). Such an entry provides a robust selection of ways to translate a word that we now recognise has a wide range of uses.
The entries for pallake and pallakis are shorter while still improving on the ‘Middle Liddell’ and the LSJ. The ‘Middle Liddell’ translates pallakis as ‘a concubine, mistress’, compares the Latin pellex and explains in Roman font: ‘opp. to a lawful wife’. ‘Concubine’ is likely to mislead modern students since they are likely to imagine women held in addition to a lawful wife. The CGL similarly uses the unfortunate word ‘concubine’ as the only translation. However, pallake receives the helpful additional definition: ‘female, slave or free, supported by a male in a semi-permanent sexual relationship other than marriage’ (p. 1054), a definition reflecting studies by C. Patterson (‘Response to Claude Mossé’, in M. Gagarin [ed.], Symposion 1990 [1991], pp. 281–7) and M. Henry (Prisoner of History: Aspasia of Miletus and her Bibliographical Tradition [1995]). This entry does not capture the entirety of the semantic range. In specifically Athenian contexts pallakia is most clearly an alternative to marriage. Since the translation ‘concubine’ is likely to confuse, it would have been better to specify that a pallake is often in place of rather than in addition to a lawful wife. Moreover, as both S.L. Budin (‘Pallakai, Prostitutes, and Prophetesses’, Classical Philology 98 [2003], 148–59) and Kennedy (2014) have discussed, there is evidence for multiple non-sexual uses of pallake, describing temple attendants and personal servants (enslaved). Kennedy (2014, pp. 136–40) argues that the term could also refer to something akin to a nanny. Budin and Kennedy rely on some of the evidence from inscriptions (excluded from CGL), but such non-sexual uses also appear in Attic oratory. Overall, the entries for women are an improvement over those found in the ‘Middle Liddell’ and the LSJ.
Translations using words such as ‘race’ and ‘ethnic’ present significant challenges and dangers. English has long used the word ‘race’ to denote categories into which people or animals are sorted, a vague usage reflected in earlier dictionaries, wherein ‘race’ is used to designate anything from a ‘race of bees’ to the ‘race of philosophers’. Today, however, the word calls to mind specifically the false biological categorisation of humans, particularly by skin colour. Ethnicity, developed as an alternative to race, is the more recent word. Used first by Weber (in German) in the early twentieth century, its use in English picks up after the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race (see J. Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity [1997]; M. Yudell, Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the Twentieth Century [2014]) as a replacement for ‘race’. The CGL does not reflect this history; instead, it uses ‘race’ as a noun and ‘ethnic’ as an adjective throughout. Put differently, ‘racial’ and ‘ethnicity’ never occur. Although ‘ethnic’ is rare (we counted 22 instances), ‘race’ is common (around 100 instances referring to group identities).
A tension thus appears between the Lexicon and decades of scholarship on race and ethnicity and their manifestations in antiquity. The entry on ethnos adds the term ‘race’ where the LSJ left it out: ‘4. group of people descended from a common ancestor or regarded as of common stock; nation, people, race’ (p. 423). They also add a subentry that defines ethnos as ‘3. group of people connected by a common attribute; race’. The examples given are mortal versus immortal and male versus female, which then suggests the translation ‘sex’, likely invoking the descendants of Pandora and the ‘race of women’.
Race and ethnicity present unique challenges for translation and debates on their usefulness or applicability to antiquity have been ongoing since the 1990s. Some scholars refuse to use race, preferring ethnicity (J. McInerney, ‘Ethnicity: an Introduction’, in J. McInerney [ed.], A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean [2014], pp. 1–16; E. Gruen, Ethnicity in the Ancient World: Did it Matter? [2020]). Others advocate using the word ‘race’ for all forms of human group identities as a way of reinserting the problematics of ‘race’ back into the discussion (D. McCoskey, Race: Antiquity and its Legacy [2012]). There is even a debate about whether ‘race’ exists in antiquity at all (see, e.g., McCoskey [2012]; B. Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity [2004]; Gruen [2020]; and J. Murray, ‘Race and Sexuality: Racecraft in the Odyssey’, in D. McCoskey [ed.], A Cultural History of Race: In Antiquity, Vol. 1 [2021], pp. 137–56). Admitting that the problem is complicated, the CGL usage risks reinforcing the nineteenth-century notion that race is a primordial, heritable biological category of humans and that race exists transhistorically the same way everywhere. Race may be a good translation at times, but that decision requires careful consideration of the context (in this case, we miss the lack of precise references in entries). One must also consider the state of the scholarship among experts on ‘race’ in sociology, anthropology, law and elsewhere outside of Classics and its continually shifting English meaning when providing resources on translation for our students. How do translations like ‘race’, ‘ethnic identity’ and ‘nation’ (re)shape our understanding of antiquity? What sort of (dangerous) anachronisms are we introducing or reinforcing?
The CGL is a welcome new tool for students of ancient Greek. It is refreshingly open with obscenity and sensitive to changing scholarship on the status of women. It is less sensitive to problems of understanding and interpreting race and ethnicity, a problem especially when the translations provided in a lexicon, a work of interpretation, are treated by our students as objective truth.
