The Oxford Classical Dictionary - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195216938 ISBN 13: 9780195216936

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2001

Synopsis

Praised by playwright Arthur Miller as "a delight for anyone with any curiosity about the roots of our Western culture" and by Booklist as "the single most heavily used book on classical studies," The Oxford Classical Dictionary is without doubt the definitive one-volume resource on ancient Greece and Rome. Now this redoubtable classic is available in electronic form on CD-ROM.
Here are over six thousand A to Z entries, ranging from long articles to biographies to brief identifications. Readers can find information on virtually any aspect of the classical world--athletics, bee-keeping, botany, magic, Roman law, philosophy, religious rites, postal service, slavery, navigation, and the reckoning of time. And with the OCD on CD-ROM, readers can find this information in seconds.
Both the thousand-page volume and the CD-ROM are available as a package, with the CD included in a sleeve in the inside back cover of the book. Together they make an unparalleled resource for anyone interested in Greece or Rome.

About this title

About the Author

Simon Hornblower is Fellow and Tutor at Oriel College, Oxford, and University Lecturer in Ancient History. Antony Spawforth is Senior Lecturer in Ancient History and Greek Archaeology at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and also Curator of the Shefton Museum there.

From Booklist

Over a quarter of a century has elapsed since the last revision to the Oxford Classical Dictionary, longer even than the 21 years between the first and second editions. As noted in the introduction to the current edition, those years have seen a phenomenal growth in classical scholarship, indeed, in all the humanistic disciplines, and an awakening of interest in new theories and subjects long ignored. Evidence of these changes can be seen in the titles of some of the approximately 800 new articles: Homosexuality, Women in Philosophy, Abortion, Class Struggle, and Literary Theory and Classical Languages. Most articles show signs of revision and reworking, often extensive. Bibliographies have been updated as well, even in those articles (mostly short ones) reprinted without change. The editors have also made an effort to make the work more accessible to the layperson. Many of the new articles are thematic articles of general interest: Earthquakes; Shipwrecks, Ancient; and Fishing, for example. Contributors have been instructed to limit explanations that require knowledge of Greek or Latin, and although a number do appear, they are generally related to very specific details and do not compromise the comprehension of the articles in which they are found. As with the second edition, there is no general index, but there are rather generous cross-references as well as asterisks next to terms for which a separate article exists.

Users of the previous editions will be happy to know that the new edition continues to function well as a tool for identification and for the location of much of what factual information is known of the ancient world. Many of the new articles are for specific individuals, places, or things, from Acanthus (a Greek colony in Chalcidice) to Zeuxis Philathes (a Greek physician of the Augustan age). The level of scholarship remains uncompromising. Bibliographies, for example, consistently list relevant primary texts and often include non-English secondary sources. Certain discussions may not be clear to every reader, as in the account under Calender, Roman of how the 10-month calendar acquired extra months, which omits any explanation of how Quintilus came to be July. An effort has been made in this edition to list persons under family name and under linguistically correct forms even when other forms may be more familiar, so that Julius Caesar is under Iulius Caesar, Gaius and Scipio Africanus under Cornelius Scipio Africanus (the elder), Publius, though adequate cross-references exist. Occasionally, an effort to move the discussion of a specific term to a more general article has produced a blind reference; the reader, for example, is told under effatus to see Augures, but in that article the term effatus is not mentioned.

Still, despite occasional difficulties, this is a work that makes a fascinating world of learning accessible to a broad audience. The editor, in thanking the contributors for their generosity, notes that "the pressures of university life are now in the direction of selfish productivity at the level of pure research." This work, though thoroughly up to date, does seem like the product of another era, when the gap between what scholars wrote and the rest of us read was less stark. It should continue to be the single most heavily used book on classical studies in the reference collections of academic libraries, and it deserves a place in all but the smallest public libraries as well as in high-school libraries where classical studies are at all a part of the curriculum.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0195216938
• ISBN 13: 9780195216936
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 1640
• Editor: Hornblower Simon, Spawforth Antony