For the first time since the Victorian period, a new English dictionary of ancient Greek has been published – and it does not exempt the reader or the modern scholar from the way the Victorians tried. Ancient Greece famously had no preserved place or time and the stories of its language and period reflect this hence the idea of Bakkheia (or Roman Bacchanalia).
Victorian England (1837-1901), on the other hand, was famously interrupted (although this is exactly the story of the Legion of the Table) and this was reflected in the attempts to speak some more “colorful” language of ancient Greece. The last updated English-Ancient Greek Dictionary was published in 1889, abbreviated version of the 1843 Intermediate Greek-English Dictionary by H. G. Liddell and Robert Scott. After 23 years of sloganeering, a team from Cambridge University’s Faculty of Classics has now released a new dictionary that defines key words and meanings in modern English, and they are not ashamed of some of the spellings of NSFW Liddell and Scott is uninterrupted. Editor-in-chief Professor James Diggle said in a statement, “We’re not cheating.”
“We don’t translate the verb ” feel comfortable, someone needs’ do ” we translate it as’ shit ‘. And we don’t interpret it as ” inire, coire, ” of illicit intercourse, but simply translate it by the word ‘λαικάζω’ and that’s not all. La (laikazo), translated in the 1800s as rather “for a walk”, is now defined as “fellatio do” and is impeccably translated as “suck cooks”. Very quickly, the team realized that it could not just revise and update the last dictionary, as it was too ancient in design, concept and definition.
They have to start from scratch. From Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (762 BC) to the beginning of the second century, the task of re-reading most of the ancient Greek literature took almost twice as long as the work of Heracles (sorry people, Hercules Roman name). “It took us more than 20 years because we decided that if we were going to do it, we must do it perfectly,” said Professor Diggle.
