PREFACE

This volume sees the light of day at a juncture at which the Thesaurus
Linguae Graecae (TLG), after more than thirteen years of operation, is
nearing completion of its computer-based data bank of ancient Greek texts.
The prefatory remarks which follow are meant to provide a brief summary of
the T L G ’s history, objectives, and identity.
The latter part of the nineteenth century witnessed an ever-growing desire
on the part of classicists for two comprehensive thesauri, one of Greek and
one of Latin. To nineteenth-century classicists, the term thesaurus denoted a
comprehensive lexicon citing and defining all (or essentially all) extant words
of a language within a specific chronological framework.
The Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, focusing on approximately 9 million
words of extant Latin text, was born in the last decade of the 1800s; work on
a Thesaurus Linguae Graecae was to commence shortly thereafter. As it
happened, human capability was not quite equal to scholarly ambition. By
1905, Hermann Diels, articulating a sentiment shared by most of his col­
leagues, declared that a TLG was simply an impossible dream. Diels’s views
on the subject can be found in the 1925 preface to the Liddell, Scott, and
Jones Greek-English Lexicon:

Any one who bears in mind the bulk of Greek literature, which is at
least 10 times as great [as that of Latin], its dialectical variations, its
incredible wealth of forms, the obstinate persistence of classical
speech for thousands of years down to the fall of Constantinople, or,
if you will, until the present day: who knows, moreover, that the
editions of all the Greek classics are entirely unsuited for purposes
of slipping, that for many important writers no critical editions
whatever exist: and who considers the state of our collections and
fragments and special Lexica, will see that at the present time all
the bases upon which a Greek Thesaurus could be erected are
lacking.

But even if we were to assume that we possessed such editions and

collections from Homer on down to Nonnus, or...dow n to Apo-
stolius, and further that they had all been worked over, slipped, or
excerpted by a gigantic staff of scholars, and that a great house had
preserved and stored the thousands of boxes, whence would come
the time, money, and power to sift these millions of slips and bring
NoS? into this Chaos?

Sixty-seven years later, the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae was born. Its iden­
tity was determined by a conclave of American, Canadian, and European
viii PREFACE

classicists convening at the University of California, Irvine, in late September

of 1972. Diels’s views were discussed aqd considered correct—correct, that is,
in a 1905 context. But it was now time to reexamine and reconsider sixty-
seven-year-old definitions.
The 1972 Thesaurus Linguae Graecae Planning Conference indeed re­
sulted in new definitions and in the acceptance of new methodologies. A
thesaurus created in the late twentieth century, it was felt, should take ad­
vantage of late-twentieth-century technology. Flexibility, rather than rigidity,
should characterize the final product.
In essence, the conference members recommended that the Thesaurus
Linguae Graecae should employ computer-assisted data entry rather than
manual Verzettelung in the process of data collection; that word definition
should be one of many pursuits, rather than the prinicipal pursuit, to be
supported by such data collection; and that the T L G ’s product should be
organic, i.e., readily adaptable to continuing progress in scholarship, rather
than static and “frozen” as traditional books and lexica become at the moment
of publication. Thus, they created a new definition of the term thesaurus·, the
Greek thesaurus would be not a lexicon, but a computer data bank.
Today, the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae is indeed a data bank of ancient
Greek texts allowing for consultation by the broadest possible scholarly audi­
ence, and a body of information which, though compiled in the 1970s and
1980s, can readily be adapted to the state of the art of classical scholarship in
the future. Ten years ago, computer-assisted research was virtually foreign to
our field; a mere handful of classicists sought access to the T L G ’s resources.
Five years later, their number had increased manifold. Today, TLG data­
bank texts are being utilized for research and pedagogical purposes at more
than a hundred institutions around the United States and abroad, and during
the past two years alone more than another hundred individuals or insti­
tutions have availed themselves of data and information generated in their
behalf by the TLG. This is not the place to enumerate the multiple uses to
which TLG data-bank texts are being put. It seems reasonable to predict,
however, that five years hence use of the T L G ’s resources will be common­
place within the field of classics.
By necessity, creation of the TLG data bank entailed consideration of a vast
number of ancillary concerns. The 1972 TLG Planning Conference mem­
bers, for instance, advised the project staff that, when completed, the data
bank should reflect all ancient Greek authors and texts extant from the period
between Homer and A.D. 600. They did not, however, specify precisely which
authors and texts would be involved. By early 1977, the project had suf­
ficiently firm control over the period from Homer to A.D. 200 to complete
data entry of the materials falling within this span. Achieving this control
necessitated literary-historical and bibliographical research conducted (ini­
tially at least) for in-house purposes only.
By early 1977, however, the T L G ’s activities were also sufficiently well
known to occasion requests not only for TLG machine-readable texts (or data
 PREFACE ix

generated therefrom), but also for ancillary materials such as the TLG staff’s
compilation of the literary canon. Between March and August 1977, in an
effort to meet requests for information residing in this canon, the project
distributed numerous versions of the canon in computer-printout form. In
doing so, the project was severely taxed in terms of both staff and financial
resources. In December 1977, a more formal Canon of Greek Authors and
Texts between Homer and A.D. 200 was published by a specially created
vehicle, TLG Publications, Inc. A total of 250 copies of the Canon were
produced in December 1977; by April 1978, the Canon was out of print.
Financial considerations argued against a second printing; furthermore, the
T L G staff was now well on its way toward gaining control over the post-A.D.
200 period. T L G Publications, Inc., was placed in a state of dormancy; never
meant to function as a publishing house in the first place, the Thesaurus
Linguae Graecae could ill afford to let its progress be retarded by publishing
tasks far better handled by others.
It was not until 1984 that publication of a second and expanded edition of
the Canon was considered. Once again, it was decided that the product of
T L G literary-historical and bibliographical research, though meant primarily
to support only in-house activities (i.e., data-bank creation), should not be
denied to the field at large. Furthermore, by early 1985, the number of
requests for T L G data-bank texts had grown to a point at which ad hoc
duplication and dissemination of the bibliographical documentation issued
along with T L G text files had reached unmanageable proportions. This vol­
ume aims at affording access to the results of thousands of hours of scholarly
labor on the part of the T L G ’s research staff to the broadest possible audi­
ence.
There are many who are owed a profound debt of gratitude; in fact, their
number is so great as to render comprehensive acknowledgment impossible.
It is only proper, however, that the following grateful acknowledgments be
made in this preface.
Like every other aspect of the T L G ’s overall product, this Canon is the end
result of a massive financial investment sustained by the wisdom and gener­
osity of a large number of private, federal, and institutional TLG supporters.
Particular mention must be made of Mr. James C. Gianulias, Dr. Marianne
McDonald, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for
i

the Humanities, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and the Uni­
versity of California, Irvine.
Next, this printed volume reflects but a small segment of vastly larger
amounts of data and information residing both in the TLG data bank and in
the electronic version of the T L G Canon and constituting a substructure
without which the T L G data bank would be unmanageable and unusable.
Creation and maintenance of this substructure would have been impossible
without complex computing facilities, highly sophisticated software, and
other technological support which was not readily available in the general
marketplace. Above all in this context, a debt of gratitude is owed to David
X PREFACE

W. Packard, the creator of the Ibycus computer system which has been used
by the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae since 1980. Without William A. Johnson,
neither the electronic nor the printed Canon would exist today; his contri­
butions to the design and implementation of both were invaluable.
Finally, though perhaps not readily visible, the labor of scores of TLG staff
members who devoted their energies to the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae over
the past thirteen years is also hidden in this volume. Their contributions are
hereby gratefully acknowledged.

University of California, Irvine Theodore F. Brunner, Director

October 1985 Thesaurus Linguae Graecae