Dictionaries as Translations

Any reading of a Greek text is an act of translation. However, it is heavily mediated by those previous dialogues represented by the tools of scholarship, which may be regarded as a kind of secondary speech community for a language no longer spoken. Foremost among these tools for an Anglophone scholar has been Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon. The conversation in which one engages in consulting its glosses is at the very least three-way, involving not only ancient Greek and one’s own ‘mother tongue’, but also the English of Liddell and Scott. This chapter seeks to bring into sharper focus the vocabulary of the first edition’s glosses—a task rendered urgent not only by the passage of time but also by the fact that the editors had an axe to grind in selecting it.