Re-reading Pollux : encyclopaedic structure and athletic culture in Onomasticon Book 3
Abstract
Ioulios Polydeukes, more commonly known as Pollux, was a Greek sophist and lexicographer active in the closing decades of the second century A.D. His Onomasticon is one of the most important lexicographical texts of the Imperial period. It is essentially a set of word lists dedicated to collecting clusters of related words on topics from a vast range of different areas of intellectual activity and everyday life. The text survives only in epitomized form, and shows signs of interpolation as well as abridgement. Nevertheless, the consensus is that the bulk of what survives is Pollux’ own work, and that reading it in Eric Bethe's Teubner edition gives an accurate cumulative impression of Pollux’ standard procedures and preoccupations, even if we cannot be entirely confident that any particular cluster of words had exactly the same form within the text's original design. It is divided into ten books, each with its own dedicatory preface addressed to the Emperor Commodus. Each book has its own distinctive focus on certain key themes, although the ordering principles are much clearer in some than in others.
Citation
König , J P 2016 , ' Re-reading Pollux : encyclopaedic structure and athletic culture in Onomasticon Book 3 ' , The Classical Quarterly , vol. 66 , no. 1 , pp. 298-315 . https://doi.org/10.1017/S0009838816000331
Publication
The Classical Quarterly
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0009-8388Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © The Classical Association 2015. This work is made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created, accepted version manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0009838816000331
Collections
Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.