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  • Introduction
  • Kathleen Coleman

The apa mounted a panel on the thesaurus linguae latinae in Chicago in 1991. We are now in a new millennium, and firmly in the digital age. The electronic search-tools that we take for granted were still a novelty then; the Thesaurus in Munich was just becoming computerized, and a complete CD-ROM/DVD of the published fascicles of the TLL was still more than a decade in the future (published by K. G. Saur in 2004, entirely independent of the Thesaurus itself, which does not have the staff for such an undertaking).1 In the intervening years, the APA has continued to send an annual Fellow to Munich; in 2005–06 the 22nd APA Fellow became the first person in the history of the project to work on a word beginning with R.

The intervening years have also witnessed increasing momentum in several trends within classical scholarship: intertextuality and new historicism have taken root; reception studies have burgeoned; the book, the body, spectacle, ethnic identity—all these have come under the microscope. Where amongst all these themes and approaches does the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae fit? Is the entire project obsolete? Is there a role for traditional philology any more? If the TLL is to reach completion, will it be because of digitization, or in spite [End Page 473] of it? For a young American scholar is there anything to be gained in spending a year at Housman's ergastulum in Munich learning the esoteric art of lexicography (Housman lv–lvi)? For the rest of us, is there any reason to take the TLL off the shelf, or even to broach the digital version?

These were questions fielded at the APA meeting in 2006 by a panel of scholars whose papers, printed here, seek to provoke consideration of what can, and cannot, be known about the Latin language, and how we can set about acquiring and testing that knowledge. The TLL, defined by the Encyclopaedia Britannica as "probably the most scholarly dictionary in the world,"2 emerges as above all a human creation: a product of great learning and industry; in perpetual evolution, holding up a mirror to trends in scholarship at large; and potentially fallible, as is the lot of all human endeavors. As Anthony Corbeill (APA Fellow 1990–91) demonstrates below, its treasury has the potential to enrich every branch of study in the Roman world, and engage the interest of anyone who seeks to understand in the smallest degree how the Romans expressed themselves and took possession of their environment.

A digital tool for a digital age: if the process of compiling what remains (N and Q–Z) is both helped and hindered by the availability of digital resources, as argued below by Michael Hillen, one of the team of editors at the Thesaurus—what, then, of the user seeking to access the published fascicles (A–M, O, most of P, and separate Onomastica for C–D)? How do digital search capabilities both help and hinder productive use of the TLL? For the scholar wanting to know how a particular occurrence is classified, the computer can deliver the information instantaneously, although with this instant gratification comes the ever-increasing temptation to focus upon a particular tree at the expense of the whole wood. The TLL has the capacity to reveal the entire, complex personality of a word, although not through citation-specific searching, which is of necessity precise and, therefore, limited—and not necessarily successful, given that not every attestation of an unexceptional usage may be included in every article.

In another way, however, the full picture is greatly enhanced by the resources of the digital version, since it is now possible to call up the dispositio of any word at all, whereas in the print edition a dispositio is only available for longer (and more recent) articles. Hence it is now possible to study the structure of every article, as well as perform detailed searches in all portions of it, including the preliminary section, where information is collected about ancient and modern theories (often revealingly divergent) concerning [End Page 474] the etymology of the word, and about its spelling, gender, forms...

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