Cambridge Grammar of Classical Greek by Evert Van Emde Boas et al. (review)

Cambridge Grammar of Classical Greek (CGCG) is a well-knit collaborative achievement of scholars, currently or formerly connected with the University of Amsterdam, whose previous publications show strong contiguous interests in the application of established and emergent linguistic knowledge and methodology to the interpretation of literary texts. That broad multidisciplinary enterprise, for decades now spearheaded in its Hellenic context by Dutch scholars, would no doubt have won approval from their predecessor, the American philologist Herbert Weir Smyth. CGCG appears a century after Smyth's Greek Grammar for Colleges (1920) and 65 years after Gordon Messing's retuning, which he considered a "corrected re-print" thereof, not a revised edition. While duly acknowledging the merits of Smyth's work, Messing's preface ruefully noted that financial constraints ruled out the extensive reworking called for by intervening advances in knowledge and approaches. The limitations of Messing's updating, combined with subsequent advances in Greek studies and linguistic science in general, have meant that until now the best English-language grammar of Classical Greek has maintained, even accelerated, its long obsolescence. CGCG echoes Messing's distant comments on the current deficiencies of Smyth's work while also communicating its authors' sanguine sense of the magnitude and historical importance of their own remedial labours. The preface outlines the motivating etiology and rationale for their project, its conception, and its decade-long gestation. They have also, almost simultaneously, elaborated in Journal of Classical Teaching a more detailed account of such matters,¹ replete with sample reproductions of excerpts from the book. While the JCT piece is to me something of a novelty, an oversized publisher's blurb, I am happy to refer readers of this necessarily brief and selective review to it, but even happier at the outset to encourage anyone with more than a passing interest in Classical Greek to acquire the volume.

My enthusiasm for the new arrival is tinged with nostalgia when I look across my desk at or near which an heirloom, pre-Messing, copy of Smyth has stood at the ready since I inherited it almost six decades ago. Beside it now stands a pristine specimen of its glossy (recall the etymon of English "glamour") successor, taller and broader (for good practical reasons) and therefore floppier, drooping noticeably in its soft cover under the strain of 853 pages. That minor infelicity will not attend the orthopedic hardcover nor the incorporeal e-book which, to boot, is virtually ubiquitous and, at least for content in the Latin alphabet, machine-searchable. The former goes for three to four times the modest price of the paperback, the latter for about 20% less. By current standards any of the three is a bargain.

More must be said of aesthetic (sensu graeco) matters, and not only because the authors cite the visual datedness of Smyth as a potential deterrent to students. Their product, by contrast, displays a fresh spiffiness. The cover emblazons against an azure background the title and the authors' names in bold white lettering above an engaging image of a 1946 abstract sculpture entitled "Pelagos," by the English artist Barbara Hepworth. The book volunteers no parsing of the symbolism, leaving the curious to our own musings. The Greek title of "Pelagos" is evocative, and, although inspired by a sea-view at St. Ives, the piece is here set against Aegeanesque colouring that might suggest Hepworth's later Greek-named ("Corinthos," "Delphi," "Epidauros") sculptures or her "Aegean Suite" of lithographs, all reportedly inspired by the light, landscape, and architecture of Greece. Hepworth is also recognized for her neoclassicism; some critics even discern reminiscences of Praxiteles in her work. Whatever instructions or inspiration guided the commercial designers of the cover, I note that in one sense or another "Pelagos," like CGCG, is both English...