Later that day, the list received a reply from Peter Green.
‘The answer, alas is “no”. Why? Were you thinking of filling the gap? A lot of people would be grateful, I suspect.’
The following day Bill Hutton added, ‘Since translating the Suda would be a task requiring greater chalcenterocity than most individual classicists possess, perhaps we should make it a group project.’ Hutton thought it would be just the sort of thing the global academy did best: ‘Each of us could send in our favourite entries by e-mail.’
An hour later Elizabeth Vandiver emailed: ‘Sounds good to me – I claim ikria.’
This conversation went on for a while, years in fact. If one wasn’t a classicist, and one came across this open conversation by chance, one might have several questions. Why did Professor Vandiver choose ikria? And what actually was the Suda?
Before any of these could be answered, there was another keen outpouring online; it seemed, in fact, that enthusiasm was boundless from all quarters of the United States and Europe.
‘I cannot think of a better collaborative enterprise,’ wrote Professor Joe Farrell from the University of Pennsylvania, ‘nor of a better way to create and distribute the product than via WWW. May I suggest that there is also an opportunity to organize a number of graduate seminars around this objective? This would speed the work and lend excellent focus to the training of young scholars.’
The next day, several other contributors began to consider how HTML text would be unified on the site, and how much time such a translation project would cost, and what sort of cross-referencing there would be. Almost immediately the project had a follow-up project with a name – Suda On Line – and someone proposed a logo reflecting its acronym: a shining sun.
‘I think all these suggestions are terrific,’ wrote Kenneth Kitchell, a classics professor at Louisiana State University. ‘I would like to add one cautionary note, however. Such a project is likely to be done once and once only. Quality control is of great concern so that the project becomes a vehicle for fostering the dissemination of information and not mis-information.’
James Butrica sounded another word of warning. ‘The original suggestion, for people to translate their favourite entries, is not going to work, since it would require too much supervision to make sure that everything got covered and some entries might languish untouched (not everybody is as interested in Iophon as I am, for example). But if each letter were taken by one translator, with additional translators for the letters like alpha that have many entries, it could be done in a relatively expeditious manner. Si monumentum requiris …
And in this way was a monumental project born. It took sixteen years to complete (or at least to arrive at what its editors called a ‘usable standard’), and some of its founders, such as Professor Butrica, did not live to see its full online publication. The Internet was a very different place in 2014 to when the translation had begun, but a small community had managed to produce a work that spoke only of its best attributes – namely, the collaborative dissemination of information and ideas. And it was no small irony that the work of translation (co-ordinated by two of its founders Bill Hutton and Elizabeth Vandiver, and based at the University of Kentucky) reflected the aim and methodology of the original cohort of writers who had worked on it more than 1000 years before. And this time it had footnotes and a bibliography, and was keyword searchable.
The Suda (or Fortress/Stronghold) was a vast tenth-century Byzantine Greek historical encyclopaedia combining material on classical antiquity with biblical and Christian sources. It had been edited and published several times since the end of the fourteenth century, but it had never previously been fully available in English. It was compiled no later than 1000 CE, but its compiler or compilers remain unknown. The entries are arranged in alphabetical order, and appear as a combination of dictionary and conventional encyclopaedia: grammatical points and philosophical concepts blend with biographies of ancient authors and lines from ancient texts. Sources range from Aristophanes, Homer and Sophocles, as well as Pliny’s Naturalis Historia and other classical abridgements. More than 200 people worked on its modern peer-reviewed translation, an extraordinary display of scholarship and erudition producing 30,000 entries on history, literature and biography that might otherwise be lost to us.
What may we see through this looking glass? At random: that the ancient Greek word Galeagra (in its Latin transliteration) means ‘weasel trap, a device for punishment’ and is accompanied by an unsourced quote: ‘As a finale they threw [him?] into a weasel-trap all shut up with iron bolts and rolled it on rough ground,’ which may refer to a specific cruelty practised by Caligula.
We find that Gallos translates as ‘eunuch’, as in the quip from Greek philosopher Arcesilaus that ‘Galli come from men, but men do not come from Galli’. Another example cites a cunning military ploy: ‘He sent out youths whom he had prepared as Galli – with pipers, in women’s robes, and having drums and figurines – against those besieging the territory.’
And we learn that the verb Gastrizesthai means to be gorged or ‘nourished rather magnificently’, but also to be hit in the gut. And that the noun Galasinois translates as ‘dimples’, specifically the lines that derive from laughing (the philosopher Democritus was nicknamed Dimple when he laughed at the hollow ambition of mankind).
And of those special entries earmarked by the founding editors of Suda On Line in their first tentative emails, Ikira means ‘benches or planks’, and may be used to define the earliest form of theatre seating. Iophon was an Athenian tragedian, the son of Sophocles. He is credited with some fifty plays, although authorship is disputed, and many of them may have been the work of his father. And what of Bill Hutton’s consciously pretentious use of the word chalcenterocity? It derives from chalcenterous, meaning the possession of ‘bowels of brass’, a gender-neutral equivalent of balls of brass, or ‘possessing a tough, indomitable and possibly foolhardy nature’.
CAMPFIRE TALES
We may ask what the monk of 1010 or the squire of 1050 was really learning here. Even if they could read Greek or Latin and had access to such a manuscript as the Suda, how much use was it to know that the Greek word Angopênia, which meant ‘woven vessel’ derived from the honeycomb pattern in a beehive? Or that Ankôn denotes an elbow both in the biological and architectural sense (the latter describing a small room or enclosed area where a tyrant may throw someone undesirable)? This is indeed the ultimate expression of ‘knowledge in the round’, as ancient tutors had intended for their school curriculum; it borders on trivia, and is no less fascinating for that.
We may logically ask the same question of all medieval collations. The Cambridge professor Peter Burke has noted that what may pass for knowledge today would carry quite another definition a few hundred years ago. One can make a valid distinction between ‘raw’ information (something practical and specific), and ‘cooked’ knowledge, something that has been processed and analysed. Even this varies over time: early medieval knowledge would certainly incorporate witchcraft, angels and demons. We know that wisdom is not a cumulative accretion of facts, but something to be learnt, perhaps through experience. But even an individual’s gathering of knowledge may not always be progressive; increasing specialisation may produce a more limited range of knowledge, and when encyclopaedias are updated we may lose ‘old knowledge’ to make way for new.*