The Oxford Classical Dictionary. Fourth Edition ed. by Simon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth, Esther Eidinow (review)

The Oxford Classical Dictionary has served as a reference work of consistent and incomparable value since its first edition appeared in 1949. The fourth edition of this now standard work adds ninety “new and replacement entries” (vii) to the third edition’s coverage (1996), while also revising and updating (in varying degree) that edition’s individual articles. In a BMCR assessment (2012.08.34), Duncan Campbell has already pointed to many of the improvements (and a few annoyances) characteristic of the new fourth edition. Readers of this journal, as they await publication of the Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity, may find it worth considering how the changes brought to this new recension of the Oxford Classical Dictionary will better meet the needs of students of Late Antiquity. The third edition, which was thirty percent larger than the second (1970) and introduced “Late Antiquity” as a distinct “area” with its own editor, John Mathews, was a true watershed. For the fourth edition, Jill Harries, who wrote a number of the late antique entries for the third edition, has assumed this role for an area whose rubric has been (tell-ingly) modified to “Late Antiquity and Christianity.”

Of the fourth edition’s ninety new or replacement entries perhaps onefifth might be deemed essentially late antique. The replacement entries in this group largely reflect newer perspectives: Arianism, for example, has transitioned from a “principle heresy” to a “polemical term,” while the “colonate” (which replaces“colonus”) appears here as an institution characterized by the controversies that have defined modern understanding of it. The bulk of the newly added late antique entries introduce individuals who did not command their own articles in the third edition (Aspar, Avitus, Eutocius. Glaucus, Helena Augusta, Melania the Younger, and Aelia Pulcheria), although ancient Judaism’s profile has also been significantly enhanced with new entries on Jewish art, the Jewish catacombs, circumcision, and the Tosefta. Some third-edition articles (“Ausonius,” for example) have been updated primarily (or even solely) by modifying or expanding bibliography, while others have been substantially rewritten (e.g., “catacombs, Christian”). Sensitivity both to continuity between the classical and later period and to the current general interest in Late Antiquity itself is further evident, for example, in the replacement entry on “metre, Latin,” which now takes the story down to late antique and medieval verse, in the recrafted entry for “Rome (history),” and in the new entry on “migration.”

Together with new articles on “heresy” and a replacement entry on “asceticism,” the changes mentioned above suggest how the fourth edition of the Oxford Classical Dictionary reflects contemporary approaches to the classical world and later Roman history.