The history of bilingual dictionaries reconsidered: an ancient fragment related to pseudo-Philoxenus (P.Vars. 6) and its significance

Dickey, E. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4272-4803 (2021) The history of bilingual dictionaries reconsidered: an ancient fragment related to pseudo-Philoxenus (P.Vars. 6) and its significance. Classical Quarterly, 71 (1). pp. 359-378. ISSN 1471-6844 doi: 10.1017/S0009838821000343

Abstract/Summary

This article identifies a papyrus in Warsaw, P.Vars. 6, as a fragment of the large Latin–Greek glossary known as Ps.-Philoxenus. That glossary, published in volume II of G. Goetz's Corpus Glossariorum Latinorum on the basis of a ninth-century manuscript, is by far the most important of the bilingual glossaries surviving from antiquity, being derived from lost works of Roman scholarship and preserving valuable information about rare and archaic Latin words. It has long been considered a product of the sixth century a.d., but the papyrus dates to c.200, and internal evidence indicates that the glossary itself must be substantially older than that copy. The Ps.-Philoxenus glossary is therefore not a creation of Late Antiquity but of the Early Empire or perhaps even the Republic. Large bilingual glossaries in alphabetical order must have existed far earlier than has hitherto been believed.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/85699
Identification Number/DOI	10.1017/S0009838821000343
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Humanities > Classics
Publisher	Cambridge University Press
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