I have the fondest memories of the Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD). I first discovered it at school during “A” level Latin and Greek and having mined it for a range of entries which allowed me to write a very successful essay on transport in the Roman Empire, I realized its worth and consulted it constantly thereafter and throughout my undergraduate studies; and from time to time since, but during that time even the ancient world, once seeming so immutable, has changed. Or, at least, our approach to and study of the ancient world has changed, and pretty radically too. The signs were there in my undergraduate days, but with the decline in the teaching of Latin in schools (never mind Greek), the teaching and study of classics no longer has the same close text‐based basis my generation enjoyed. At the same time, other disciplines have developed or grown, including history, economics, sociology and anthropology, while such as women’s studies have arisen. All is reflected in the current edition of this great work.
The first edition will have still been current in my school days (just, I hasten to add); a second, published in 1970, still reflected the approach of the 1960s when it was written, so that a third edition was deemed necessary for the 1990s and duly published in 1996, having been compiled from 1991. This was an entirely new work, aiming to preserve the many and prominent virtues of the previous editions, but reflecting contemporary scholarship and outlook. Some things did not change: specificity of entries was retained, so that the material of the second edition was either directly reworked or replaced. Very few entries were retained without alteration and those normally only the shortest; the Editors point to an important exception in H.T. Wade‐Gery’s article on Thucydides, a classic reprinted from the 1949 edition, but with an addendum to discuss work on the historian since 1970. Very few entries have been discarded altogether as the editors seek to retain the direct factual coverage that established the title’s reputation. Greece and Rome remain central (as reflected still in the book’s title), but wider and previously under‐represented areas (both geographical and thematic) are now covered, and the interdisciplinary nature of modern scholarship is reflected in a discernible shift away from a literary basis.
Archaeological evidence is integrated with other scholarly approaches and new topics: sexuality, anthropology, class struggle, orientalism, race, attitudes to warfare, attitudes to wealth. These are but a handful of more than a dozen columns (in very small print) of new entries listed helpfully in the preface. A shift towards inclusion of cultures and places away from the traditional central Italy and Greece is indicated by new entries such as Akkadian, Dead Sea Scrolls, Indo‐Greeks, Judaea and Ugarit. Now there are 6,250 entries by an international team of 364 scholars, resulting in a largely new or re‐written edition of a classic of long standing. The Editors have worked to five guiding principles, which they explain in their preface:
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1 Specificity, recognizing (as I did all those years ago) that the value of the work rests on its factual coverage.
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2 A less traditional work and coverage, but retaining its original title: here the success is evident from retaining all the entries I used to use in a more restricted classical context, but widening the whole work at the same time.
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3 More thematic entries, to help more general readers and students approach, understand and appreciate major topics (such as ecology, economy, imperialism and many others).
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4 Accessibility, so that a conscious, and successful, effort has been made to use plain English with non‐specialists in mind, and to reduce quotations of untranslated Latin or Greek to a minimum. One technical point arises here, where Roman names of the Republican and Imperial eras are listed by nomen rather than as previously by cognomen; a logical step, although the reference “Cicero, see Tullius Cicero” or “Scipio Africanus, see Cornelius Scipio Africanus” will take a bit of getting used to by some of us. On the other hand, familiar spellings and forms of names (Livy, Aeschylus, etc.) are retained. Another point to note is that the “index” of names and terms not featured as headwords introduced in the 1970 edition is now dropped: it was something of a curiosity and hardly used. Cross‐references are widely signposted throughout the texts or listed at the ends of entries.
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5 An international OCD. Apparently previous editions were too parochially British, so scholars from Europe and North America were added to the contributors: again, logical enough where the foremost experts in their subjects were thereby recruited.
This all implies, but it is still worth highlighting, the breadth of coverage which is first of all retained from the scope of the original edition and now so broadly and successfully expanded: politics, government and the economy; religion and mythology; law and philosophy; science and geography; languages, literature, art and architecture; archaeology and historical writing; military history; social history, sex and gender.
The strangest thing to this reviewer about the new volume is that all this is contained in a book physically smaller than the one he was familiar with. In fact it is 30 per cent larger in content and retains the same alphabetical arrangement, but thinner paper and smaller (but perfectly legible) typeface and references by code to major sources (listed in almost 50 columns in the preface) make this a masterpiece of compression: multum in parvo indeed. The editors and contributors are to be congratulated on producing such a consistent, accurate and wide‐ranging reference book. It is all here as I remember it, including the entries on roads, bridges, wheeled transport, postal services and the like which once served me so well; but tempora mutantur and so it is expanded successfully and seamlessly into new fields of study and other cultures surrounding the classical Greek and Roman worlds. The publishers, too, are to be congratulated, first for commissioning the new work, then for making such a physical success of its production.
This is, in fact, a revised version of the 1996 third edition: “many small slips have been corrected (and one new definition entry added, on ‘epinician poetry’)”. The affiliations of the contributors have not been altered (probably wisely, as there would be almost as many changes between setting and printing as there have been in the intervening years), although those deceased since publication are noted. Whether the tidying up between 1996 and 2002 warrants a library purchasing this new issue if it already has a 1996 copy will be a matter for the library to decide: it will not be surprising if the original volume is showing signs of wear, for this really is one of the small number of absolutely fundamental and classic (in the wider sense of course) reference works. If you have a major or historical reference collection and did not buy the 1996 edition, now is the time to remedy the omission.
