Whitaker, G. Unvollendetes: the Oxford Plato Lexicon.

Published in:
Classical Books: Scholarship and Publishing in Britain since 1800.
London: Institute of Classical Studies, 2007. Bulletin (University of
London. Institute of Classical Studies). Supplement; 101, 97-112

http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/3829/

Deposited on: 13 November 2007

Glasgow ePrints Service

http://eprints.gla.ac.uk
 UNVOLLENDETES: THE OXFORD PLATO LEXICON

Graham Whitaker (University of Glasgow)

In one obvious sense this paper is a misfit within a book that otherwise charts so
much achievement. The unfinished project that it describes occupied the attention of
two Scottish professors and, in its later reincarnation, a distinguished German
academic, himself subsequently a professor, for a total of thirty-six years. Publishing
projects that come to nothing are often at least as interesting as those that come to
fruition; they will never be able to claim significance, but they may instead provide
mystery or perhaps a salutary lesson. I offer two excuses for unearthing the story of
the Plato Lexicon. First, it is reasonably well documented; second, it illustrates a
number of features about the history of classical scholarship and publishing in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although in one sense the story is incomplete and
remains a mystery, the answers to several important questions are clear enough: how
and why the project came into being, how it was undertaken, and why it failed.

Two of the final letters from Benjamin Jowett (1817-1893), written in September
1893, were addressed to his co-editor of Plato’s Republic,1 Lewis Campbell (1830-
1908); the second of these includes the following passage:

I want you to be the person who devote[s] your knowledge & experience to this
great work. It is a work worthy of the last ten years of a scholar’s life … 2

The ‘great work’ that Jowett had in mind was not only the completion of the Republic
edition but a more detailed study of Plato’s use of language. Jowett realised that his
own efforts in this respect were both incomplete and inadequate,3 and asked Campbell
not only to remedy this but to produce something more enduring:

My idea of such a book would be, that it would consist, firstly, of only those
parts of Ast’s Lexicon which one desires to read, or of similar parts of
Goodwin’s Greek Syntax.4 Books of that sort all want reading in the present
day & to be made as simple as possible. The gentle Riddell [this is James

1
 Riddell (1823-1866), author of A Digest of Platonic Idioms5] is eccentric, &
not always intelligible.6

In the three-volume edition of the Republic Campbell devoted the third of his own
essays that constitutes about half of the second volume to Plato’s use of language.7
Not surprisingly, he followed Jowett’s advice only in part: in fact, he made
considerable use of Riddell’s work, combining it with Goodwin’s. He divided the
essay into two parts – also against Jowett’s advice – these being a discussion of style
and syntax and of Platonic diction, the latter subdivided into three sections: first, new
derivatives and compounds; second, the selection and use of words; third,
philosophical terminology. It is this division that helps to bring to Campbell’s
discussion the clarity that Jowett had suggested. The essay is also a synthesis and
summary of then-current scholarship: Campbell’s discussion of particles shows a
keen awareness of continental writing on their use as a factor in the relative dating of
the dialogues.8 The work of preparing this essay, not least the section on particles,
would have given Campbell a close acquaintance with Ast’s Lexicon and its
shortcomings. As will become apparent, this was one of the reasons he gave for
undertaking a replacement work.

The Lexicon Platonicum of Georg Anton Friedrich Ast (1778-1841) was published in
three parts from 1835 to 1838, by Weidmann in Leipzig. There is a long tradition of
Platonic lexicography, stretching back to the otherwise unknown Timaeus, who –
sometime between the second and fifth century A.D. – compiled a lexicon of the more
obscure words found in Plato. Although Ast’s work had been anticipated more
recently in the dictionaries by Johann Jakob Wagner (1775-1841) published at
Göttingen in 1799, and by Thomas Mitchell’s (1783-1845) Index Graecitatis
Platonicae of 1832,9 his credentials as a Plato scholar had been established by the
study of Plato’s life and writings published in 1816,10 and neither the Wagner
dictionary nor the Mitchell index achieved the reputation of Ast during the remainder
of the Nineteenth Century. Wagner’s dictionary is systematic and, according to its
preface, was designed to present the ‘spirit’ of Platonic philosophy.11 Mitchell’s on
the other hand is alphabetical; it excludes particles, but has a useful index of classical
names, both historical and geographical. The principal shortcomings of Ast’s Lexicon
are, first, those of incompleteness, both in the words included and in terms of their

2
definition, and, second, the arrangement, which is unsystematic and makes no real
attempt to classify usages: the article on ειµι for example occupies thirteen closely
printed pages in which neither forms nor usage can be readily distinguished without
reading the whole.12

The first mention of Campbell’s involvement with the Plato Lexicon occurs in a letter
dated 13 June 1897 from D.B. Monro (1836-1905), Provost of Oriel, to Campbell.
Reporting on a meeting of the Oxford Philological Society where the Polish scholar
Wincenty Lutosławski (1863-1954) had given a paper on the chronology of the
dialogues, Monro wrote that:

In the discussion that followed there was some talk of a new Lexicon
Platonicum, and the Committee was asked to take steps in the direction of
getting such a work produced. I believe you have a plan of a more or less
definite character in which the first step would be to get up a subscription
which would enable some platonic scholar, perhaps Constantin Ritter, to give
three years’ work to it.

His letter ends with the confession that “it seems to me a larger project than we can
expect to carry out, but it can do no harm to try.”13 Monro was to be proved correct in
his first opinion, though not in his second.

We learn most about the course of Campbell’s subsequent involvement in the Lexicon
from an appeal he addressed to the Trustees of the Ireland & Craven Funds in
September 1902.14 Following the proposal made at the Oxford meeting in 1897, he
had proceeded to do what Monro requested, noting that:

Having resolved to do what I could towards this object, I consulted with a small
Committee consisting of Sir Richard Jebb … [and others]15 … By their advice I
undertook the Editorship, and obtained a grant of £150 from the Hellenic
Society for Editorial purposes. Proposals were then circulated and subscriptions
from the United Kingdom and America of £300 … were ultimately received.16

3
Official discussion of the project by the Delegates seems to have taken place initially
on 6 May 1898 when, in response to a formal proposal drawn up by Campbell and
dated 4 May 1898, “A Concordance to the Text of Plato” is mentioned in the Order
Book, under proposals considered. It was resolved to ask Ingram Bywater (1840-
1914), Regius Professor of Greek and a Delegate of the Press, to prepare a report
together with Charles Cannan (1858-1919), Acting Secretary to the Delegates.17 The
proposal was considered further on 8 July and Bywater undertook “to confer with Mr.
Burnet [John Burnet (1863-1928)] in the meantime”.18 The result of this conference
was twofold: to set certain conditions, and to prepare a specimen of what at that stage
was still being referred to as a concordance. The conditions were as follows:

a) The references to be all of them classified under their proper heads.

b) A set of rules to be drawn up for the direction of the readers, to ensure the
requisite unity of scale and plan in the work of the various collaborators.
These rules to be submitted to the Delegates.
c) The work to be sent in in a complete form within seven years.
d) The whole not to exceed 900 pages like the pattern.19

The schedule for its production reveals that the work was officially accepted by the
Press on 21 October 1898,20 and this is supported by the entry in the Delegates’ Order
Book for that date: “On the motion of Mr. Bywater, seconded by Dr Sanday,21 it was
resolved that the work [the Lexicon] be accepted on the terms set forth in Mr.
Campbell’s letter [of 20 October] and in the Delegates’ resolution of July 29 last: on
the further undertaking that the book shall in no case exceed a maximum of 600
pages.”22 Already by late August the work was being referred to as a lexicon not a
concordance, a fact reflected in the reduction by one third of the length; a
concordance is nearly always more extravagant in space than a lexicon, given the
need for repetitive contextual material.

Cannan wrote to Campbell on 1 November, setting out the detailed conditions that the
Delegates had laid down, and adding the end of 1905 as the date for delivery of the
complete work. Campbell replied immediately, accepting the conditions, and adding
that “it will be my own fault if we do not produce something more useful than Ast.
The time allowed seems ample – in looking forward.”23

4
In 1899 a further meeting was held in Oxford at Queen’s College at which rules for
the guidance of contributors were drawn up, and thereafter in November 1900 the
Press issued a prospectus, which included on the reverse a specimen sheet.24 Campbell
set out five objectives in the prospectus, all of which in some way point to the
shortcomings in Ast’s work:

1) To Verify and Correct the materials collected by AST.

2) To include all the Proper Names which occur in Plato.
3) To treat Particles and Prepositions much more fully than AST has done.
4) To Distinguish and Classify the Various Uses and Constructions of words.
5) To complete the work of AST with Examples and References derived from
a fresh examination of the whole text.

As I remarked at the beginning, we know a good deal about the method of compiling
the Lexicon initially. The 1839 Zürich edition of Johann Georg Baiter (1801-1877),
Johann Kaspar von Orelli (1787-1849) and August Wilhelm Winckelmann (b. 1810)25
was adopted as the textual basis. At first sight, it may seem odd that Campbell
decided on this, when he knew that Burnet’s Oxford text was imminent; his health
however was no longer good (the Campbells had acquired a home in Italy at Alassio
for this reason), and he could not have known that Burnet would produce a complete
Plato as quickly as he did.26 Cannan, I suspect, felt uneasy about the decision and on
at least two occasions expressed the hope that Burnet’s text would be available for use
by the project.27 Campbell decided to work on the revision of Ast’s Lexicon himself,
and to farm out slips for the ordering of the entries under the appropriate lemmata to a
team of contributors who would read through an allotted section of the text. Two lists
of names survive, one started by Campbell in 1899 and a revised list from 1903,28 and
they include scholars (such as A.W. Mair [1875-1928], subsequently Professor of
Greek at Edinburgh) as well as others, probably schoolmasters or clergymen.
Overseas helpers were enlisted from America, including Henry Rushton Fairclough
(1862-1938) of Stanford, the editor of Vergil (1916-1918) and of Horace’s Satires and
Epistles (1926) for the Loeb series; Fairclough was to offer particular service in the
indexing of prepositional forms. The actual form of the slips was identical to those
used by James Murray for the New English Dictionary; Cannan wrote to Campbell on
the subject in May 1899:

5
 As to slips I think we shall probably do best to reproduce Dr. Murray’s
exactly. There is a difficulty in printing the dialogue on each slip, as some are
longer than others; and it is best to print on sheets and then cut. But if it would
be of any considerable advantage we could furnish a first supply to
everybody.29

Campbell wrote to Gilbert Murray in February 1900 and gave an account of his
progress:

I plod away with my work on the Plato Lexicon and sheaves of slips have
begun to pour in. My own part in it is straightforward but tedious. I take the
material between the boards of Ast, correct his numerous slips (as to paging,
letters etc.) and recast each article, classifying uses and constructions. In this
way I have overtaken 850 pages, and hope to end the first volume in another
fortnight.30

The appeal for funds of 1902 notes the further progress made. Campbell recorded
that:

In the revision of Ast … I have now overtaken 1,600 pages out of 1,974 …
The following dialogues have been completely indexed by contributors [he
gives a list of 14 together with two books of the Republic and three of the
Laws] … Fair progress has been made with the following, which remain
unfinished [another ten together with the remaining books of the Republic and
Laws and the Epistles]. The following have not yet been allotted [a list of
nine] … The slips, so far sent in, have been sifted so as to distinguish
references not included in Ast, from those contained in his work.

From this it can be calculated that somewhere between one third and one half of the
total had been indexed in this way by October 1902. The Press, or more particularly
Cannan, had also been active in thinking about the project since its acceptance by the
Delegates in 1898. As early as May of that year he wrote to Campbell suggesting a
typographical layout:

6
 We should be glad to know whether you have formed any definite idea of the
type to be used; it has occurred to us [Cannan means himself] that Dunbars
concordance to the Odyssey might serve in the first instance as a pattern; there
could be a slight economy of space as the Homer lines each take a line of the
print, whereas the prose quotations would run on.31

August 1898 saw the change in conception from concordance to lexicon, and with it a
suggested change in style to that of the Liddell and Scott Greek-English Lexicon, the
eighth edition of which had been published in the preceding year. Enclosing a
specimen sheet, Cannan noted:

Under Prof[essor] Bywater’s directions we have tried experiments in

reprinting Ast, with a view to determining more exactly the number of pages
which a new lexicon may be expected to occupy … The style, you will notice,
is very much that of Liddell & Scott. Except that the names of the dialogues
might be abbreviated as suggested by you … I cannot think of other
mechanical economies.32

I mentioned the role played by Burnet at the outset, both as consultant and as editor of
the text that Cannan at least hoped would form the basis of the Lexicon. The May
1898 proposal from Campbell to the Delegates of the Press mentions Burnet as one of
a number of distinguished scholars who had promised their help. From at least April
1903, when Campbell became seriously ill, Burnet continued to act as an unofficial
sub-editor, with responsibility for revising the whole work, until a few weeks before
Campbell’s death in 1908.33 Thereafter his first act was to issue a report on the work
and a financial statement that shows the generous support offered by the American
Philological Association.34 The report drew attention to the underestimate in
Campbell’s proposal of the labour required to complete the Lexicon. Two things in
particular had caused problems: first, the treatment of particles and prepositions,
omitted by Ast; second, the other deficiencies of Ast, including incorrect references
and incomplete treatment of philosophical terms. Despite this, the report shows
remarkable progress. Campbell had managed to correct all the misprints and incorrect
references in Ast and to complete the proper names. The reclassification according to
meanings and constructions was also largely complete, having being undertaken by

7
Burnet himself. The indexing of slips had been completed to the word µοχθηρός.
Overall, about ⅝ of the total had been achieved. The most important section
remaining to be done was that on the particles, and it was for financial help to achieve
this that Burnet’s report was specifically written. Otherwise, as he remarked, “if … I
have to do it all myself, with such help as may be gratuitously offered, the completion
of the Lexicon will be delayed some years.” The Delegates had already agreed to an
extension of the date proposed for delivery (to the end of 1906). Another incentive for
continuing the work as swiftly as possible was its link – in Burnet’s view - to the
proposed Thesaurus Graecus that had been in discussion since 1904. He noted in a
letter of December 1908 that:

Both Diels and Cronert of Göttingen35 keep writing to me on the subject [of
the Lexicon] and I want to get support from them, as this is going to be the
foundation of the Thesaurus.36

In the event, agreement was not reached over the form which the latter might take.
Though Burnet was able to raise sufficient funds through additional subscriptions,
work seems to have dragged on to little purpose. His own Oxford text now became
the basis for the Lexicon and this necessitated a certain amount of adjustment or
revision. R.W. Chapman (1881-1960), later Secretary to the Delegates, contributed
substantially in the form of detailed work on the particles which he sent to Burnet in
April 1914.37 During the First World War, collaborative work became almost
impossible. After the War, Burnet’s enthusiasm for the project waned, while during
the 1920s his health deteriorated. The War had also brought to the Press a new
realism in respect of its long-standing projects. A memorandum from Chapman to
Humphrey Milford (1877-1952) in May 1922 records that:

Burnet … called. He spent the best years of his life on the Plato Lexicon
(though it wasn’t his pigeon), but that can’t be helped. He does not see that we
could possibly do it now or in the proximate future, and therefore does not
propose to waste his last years upon it. A great deal has been done and is in
order, if posterity wants to use it.38

8
Burnet turned instead to other projects, including an edition of the scholia to Plato,39
and, following his retirement from the Greek chair at St Andrews in 1926, accepted
an invitation to be the Sather Professor at the University of California. In September
1931, three years after his death, his widow contacted the Press about the accumulated
material for the Lexicon and Chapman asked if it could be sent for storage at the
Press.40 Some of the material was damaged by water from a burst pipe during the time
that the Burnets were in America, according to Mrs Burnet. On receipt of it, Chapman
wrote further to Burnet’s literary executor William Laughton Lorimer (1885-1967)
and his letter details the material as received. It consisted of i) Burnet’s manuscript,
“incorporating a certain amount of Campbell’s”, from alpha to omega ii) copies of the
Oxford Text volumes, in which Burnet had erased in the text with a blue pencil those
words that were complete in the manuscript iii) Chapman’s own materials on the
particles, which (as he noted ruefully) were “in a horrid mess”. Apart from this, the
position of the other slips that had been accumulated by Burnet is unclear; Lorimer
claimed to remember having seen them, but they may have been destroyed by Burnet
as he worked on the manuscript, or at some later time.41 It seems certain that, after its
arrival in Oxford, the material was used by other scholars; the same letter to Lorimer
includes Chapman’s opinion that it would be useful for the new [ninth] edition of
Liddell & Scott, and that he had “told J.A. S[tewart] (1846-1933) about it and expect
he will come in eager to look up logos.” In December, Chapman wrote to J.D.
Denniston (1887-1949), inviting him to consult the material on particles, and the
preface to Denniston’s 1934 study acknowledges the debt to Chapman.42

Apart from a flickering of interest in November 1935, matters rested there until after
the Second World War. In July 1948 Bruno Snell (1896-1986) wrote to the Press;43
Snell was the director of the Archiv für Griechische Lexikographie that was (and, as
the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, still is) attached to the Seminar für Klassische
Philologie of Hamburg University. He had learned from Paul Maas (1880-1964) of
the existence of the Plato Lexicon project and asked whether the surviving materials
could be sent on loan for the use of a similar project, the planning of which had begun
in Germany under the direction of the Archiv. Curiously enough, Burnet had
reviewed – not very favourably – one of Snell’s earliest published works in the
Classical Review.44 In his request Snell stated that:

9
 The actual work will mostly be done in Hinterzarten near Freiburg (Baden) by
Dr. Georg Picht, the director of a Landerziehungsheim, his colleagues, and
other collaborators, that we shall send there from here.

Snell planned to take part in the project himself and his postcard also reveals
something of Picht’s working method that had begun “with excerpts from
commentaries and other works on Plato, where the meaning of Platonic words is
analysed”.

Georg Picht (1913-1982) is perhaps scarcely known in Britain in the annals of

classical scholarship; in Germany and beyond, however, he occupied a distinguished
position as an educational theorist and theologian. He was born in Strassburg into an
intellectual family – his mother was the sister of the scholar of French and European
literature Ernst Robert Curtius (1886-1956) – and died at his family home in
Hinterzarten, South-West Germany.45 Picht had an unconventional education: he was
taught at home by his mother, then attended the private school Birklehof at
Hinterzarten, of which more later. He studied with Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) at
the Philosophisches Seminar at Freiburg and subsequently worked as an assistant at
the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin. His reaction against what had happened
to the German educational system under the Third Reich led him in 1946 to establish
an international school in the buildings formerly occupied by his school at
Hinterzarten. This became part of the Vereinigung Deutscher Landerziehungsheime, a
network of specialist schools reconstituted by Picht in 1947, hence the reference in
Snell’s request. The school’s outlook was international, and it gave Picht an
opportunity to put his educational ideas into operation; these included the close
relationship of knowledge and training – ‘Wissenschaft’ and ‘Bildung’ in German –
and one way he tried to achieve this was by establishing on site a Plato archive, where
work on the planned lexicon could be carried out by the research staff working
alongside the staff of the school; the research staff could then also take a part in the
school’s curriculum.

Although he continued to live in Hinterzarten, Picht accepted an appointment in 1958

to develop and extend the activities of the Forschungsstätte der Evangelischen
Studiengemeinschaft (FEST) in Heidelberg. There, in association with the German

10
protestant churches, he brought together applied theology and other disciplines, such
as law or economics, and developed research programmes in areas such as peace
studies, ecology and the politics of energy, that have retained or reclaimed their
significance since that time. In 1965 he was appointed to a personal chair in the
philosophy of religion at the University of Heidelberg. While these appointments led
him away from his direct involvement with Plato – and it is certain that any work on
the lexicon ceased once his activities were concentrated in Heidelberg – he still
conducted seminars on Plato, particularly during the nineteen sixties, and his work on
the Laws and Symposium that derived from these was published posthumously in
1990.46 He also worked on a commentary, incomplete and still unpublished, to the
Laches.

Before the Press sent any of the material, Kenneth Sisam (1887-1971) decided to
consult with senior Oxford scholars who might have an interest and accordingly wrote
to Sir David Ross (1877-1971), Lord Lindsay of Birker (1879-1952), the Master of
Balliol, and Colin Roberts (1909-1990). Roberts suggested that E.R. Dodds (1893-
1979) should also be asked for an opinion. The letters to Ross and Dodds are
preserved at OUP, together with the replies from Lindsay and Dodds, in addition to
that from Roberts.47 Dodds, incidentally, disagreed with Roberts over the continuing
worth of the Ast Lexicon, describing it as “incomplete for many words, maddeningly
ill arranged and generally inadequate to the needs of modern research”. This is much
closer to Campbell’s original view as contained in the prospectus than Roberts’s
verdict that Ast was “an excellent and thoroughly useful work”.

The material was dispatched at the beginning of August and addressed to Snell in
Hamburg. A letter from Peter Spicer (1921-1993) to Snell details the contents, which
accord with those in the 1931 letter from Chapman to Lorimer, but with the addition
of “various files of MS. lists and notes”.48 This is the last item in the OUP Archive
file; there is no acknowledgment from Hamburg but, assuming the materials reached
Germany safely, a number of questions arise. Were they forwarded to Picht in
Hinterzarten? If Picht received the materials, what use was he able or did he choose to
make of them before his own project was abandoned? Are they still extant?

11
The first of these can, I think, be answered in the affirmative. There seems no reason
to suppose that Snell would have failed to do this, given that the project there was
being conducted under the auspices of the Archiv für Griechische Lexikographie. For
whatever reason, however, Picht seems to have decided to begin his lexicon de novo.
The ten-year period from 1949 to 1958/9 when funding was received from the
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for research assistants to work at Hinterzarten on
the project resulted in a vast card index-file (776 drawers) which is preserved in the
Platon-Archiv at the Philologisches Seminar, University of Tübingen. The format of
the cards is generally the same: in the top left corner, the abbreviated name of the
work and reference from the Stephanus edition; in the top right, the appropriate
lemma; below, a four or five-line extract from Burnet’s OCT pasted on, or the text
hand-written, with the occurrence of the word-form underlined in red pencil. By the
time that regular work on this index stopped in about 1958 (for reasons which will be
discussed below), most of the Platonic corpus seems to have been indexed in this
way. By themselves indexes do not a lexicon make, however, and in this instance the
arrangement of the cards did not even extend to interfiling occurrences other than
within the same work (or book of the larger dialogues). This had to wait until the next
stage in the history of the archive - or Archiv, as it now becomes appropriate to call it.

In correspondence with scholars in Germany, some of whom worked with Picht, I

have at least been able to confirm what happened to the Birklehof Archiv. The project
to produce a lexicon remained active on the school site until the middle of the 1950s.
By that time, there were increasing demands on Picht’s own time – both from the
school and from his developing work more generally in educational theory. These
conflicting demands led to health problems, and he came to the conclusion that the
project could not be completed under his direction. In this general sense therefore the
Plato Lexicon had now claimed a third victim. But to ensure the survival of the work
that had been undertaken at Hinterzarten, Picht contacted Konrad Gaiser (1929-1988)
at Tübingen, whose outlook as a Platonist he found the most sympathetic to his own.
The date of transfer of the materials is now uncertain, but they were certainly at
Tübingen by the late nineteen sixties.49 Gaiser was to set up his own Archiv, which he
dated in a memorandum to 1970.50 The memorandum stated that he saw this as a
direct continuation of the Birklehof Archiv, although his own priorities were now
different.51 The principal aims of the Tübingen Platon-Archiv were first, to collect

12
publications of Plato editions, commentaries and of the literature relating to Plato in a
special library; second, to use this library, augmented from sources such as L’Année
philologique, to prepare a regular Plato bibliography; and only third, to work on the
Birklehof material, and then only to bring it into a single alphabetical sequence so that
it could act as a reference tool. The first of these continues; the second has given way
to the annual surveys now produced under the direction of Luc Brisson (1946-); the
third was completed in the early 1970s.

To return to my second and third questions: if Picht received the materials, what use
was he able or did he choose to make of them before his own project was abandoned?
And are they still extant? There is just one piece of evidence in the Archiv at
Tübingen which may suggest both that Picht received the materials and that he
deliberately decided against using them, although it is by no means conclusive. As an
appendix to the unfinished typescript commentary on the Laches mentioned
previously, Picht added some observations on the particle ουκουν which at least
show a lexicographical approach at work and contain criticism of Burnet: “The usage
is simple, but through the use of completely arbitrary punctuation Burnet has
introduced unnecessary confusion [= Der Gebrauch ist einfach, aber Burnet hat durch
völlig willkürliche Zeichensetzung unnötige Verwirrung hineingebracht].” This is
accompanied by discussion of some of the nineteen relevant passages in the Laches
together with Picht’s interpretation and classification of them. Though it is possible
that Picht could simply have compiled a list of occurrences himself from Burnet’s
edition, the evidence of his own copy does not wholly suggest that he did so. Picht’s
library is preserved at the FEST in Heidelberg, and I had an opportunity to examine
his copy of the relevant volume of the OCT in November 2006. He was a compulsive
annotator, in a minute but clearly legible hand, and so it can be seen that there is only
a partial correlation between the Laches manuscript and the passages he marked in his
own text. This at least suggests the alternative possibility that he may have worked as
well, or instead, from Burnet’s manuscript, with its ready classification of uses. Either
way, his expressed opinion suggests that he did not necessarily regard Burnet as the
final authority on the text of Plato.

On the third question, no clear answer can be given although it seems extremely
doubtful that any of the original Oxford Plato Lexicon material now survives. Before

13
the presentation of this paper in July 2006, I was able to establish in correspondence
with the current Director of the School, Dr Christof Laumont, that nothing remains
any longer on the Birklehof School site.52 It is also certain that no such material was
sent back by Picht to the Archiv/TLG in Hamburg, and there is no reference to
Burnet’s material in any extant correspondence in the TLG files.53 Since July I have
been able to confirm that neither is there any sign of the Oxford material at the FEST
in Heidelberg, nor at Tübingen, the other two likeliest places. It has to be remembered
that projects of this nature gather a vast amount of material; and that, when assistants
are working in succession, there may sooner or later come a stage when no-one can
quite remember the significance of a particular group of documents or how they came
to be acquired. That Picht himself was away from Hinterzarten during part of the
1950s – he travelled to Italy to recover his health – may have made this more likely.
My best guess, therefore, is that Picht or his assistants may have used the Oxford
material initially in so far as it could be used – which may not have been very far –
and then laid it aside and later discarded it.54

In the period since the 1950s, much has happened in the publication of
lexicographical aids to Plato, even allowing for the availability of Plato in the
Thesaurus Linguae Graecae canon. In 1964, Father Édouard Des Places (1900-2000)
published a lexicon, in association with Budé edition, of which it forms volume
fourteen. This concentrates on philosophical terminology and is therefore selective.
Twelve years later in 1976, Leonard Brandwood published a computer-generated
Word Index to Plato (Leeds: W.S. Maney). It has an interesting historical preface,
setting out what was, at least in Britain, an early application (from 1955 onwards) of
computer processing to the indexing of a classical text. Brandwood’s work was
known to Gaiser well in advance of its publication, since there are two documents in
the Tübingen Archiv from 1971/2 which refer to it.55 More recently the first few
volumes of a concordance to Plato by Mauro Siviero have been issued in the Alpha-
Omega series published by Olms (1994-). Finally, in 2003 the first volume in the
Lexicon series under the general direction of Roberto Radice was issued.56 This is
devoted to Plato and based on Burnet’s OCT. Despite its series title, however, the
printed volume and accompanying cd-rom only provide an index and concordance
respectively, although there is a facility to add subject headings to the text database.
In addition a number of subject or thematic dictionaries have appeared, such as

14
Morris Stockhammer’s Plato Dictionary (London: Vision Press, 1963). None of these
compilers seems to have been aware of the proposed Oxford Plato Lexicon; none of
their works sets out to do quite what the Oxford work could have achieved.

I will briefly summarise the main points of this history in drawing a few conclusions.
The work was conceived at the end of a century – the nineteenth – that had seen so
much effort devoted to lexicography by both amateurs and professional scholars, this
to serve the interests both of students and of a wider readership that the issue of
standard texts in uniform series had reached. Though Lewis Campbell may not have
proposed the idea of the Plato Lexicon in its original form, the work would not have
progressed without him; he brought to it not only a detailed knowledge of Platonic
language, but – I suspect – a sense of mission which derived from his association with
Jowett. Similarly, it could not have been continued without Burnet, whose experience
of editing Plato for the Oxford Classical Texts series was equally vital. It was sheer
bad luck that both editors should have succumbed to ill-health before the project was
realised, and that the First World War intervened. This hindered the collaborative
effort that had been such a distinctive feature of the method of compilation, drawing
something from the experience of Murray’s English Dictionary. It also led to a
reassessment at the Press, where priority now lay with the new (ninth) edition of
Liddell and Scott during the twenties and thirties, and other more specialised works
such as the Patristic Greek Lexicon (1961-1968) thereafter. Sufficient interest
remained in the idea of a Plato lexicon for it to be considered a viable project
elsewhere after the Second World War; but while the nature and extent of the work
undertaken in Germany is known, the relationship between it and the Oxford material
apparently sent to support it remains unclear. What does emerge clearly from the
surviving evidence is that the care and attention brought to Campbell’s and Burnet’s
unfinished Plato Lexicon in both planning and preparation entitle it, in my opinion, to
be considered as one of the great ‘might-have-been’ projects of classical scholarship.57

15
Accompanying Photographs

1) Lewis Campbell (1830-1908)

Portrait photograph by G.C. Beresford
By permission of Getty Images

2) John Burnet (1863-1928)

Portrait photograph by Lafayette?
Courtesy of the University of St Andrews Library

16
 3) Georg Picht (1913-1982)
Photograph copyright Dr Constanze Eisenbart

4) Lexicon card file in the Platon-Archiv, Philologisches Seminar,

Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen November 2006
Photograph copyright Graham Whitaker

1
 Note on citations

All references are to documents in the Archive at Oxford University Press, unless otherwise stated.
Quotations from these are included by permission of the Secretary to the Delegates of Oxford
University Press and the copyright holders (where the Press does not hold the copyright). Reasonable
attempts have been made to identify the estate or copyright holder of letters written to the Press.
Quotations from the Jowett Papers at Balliol College are included by permission of the Jowett
Copyright Trustees; from the Murray Papers by permission of Dr Alexander Murray and the Keeper of
Western Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

The papers in the relevant OUP file (CP38/695) are numbered sequentially from 000001 to 000082; I
have simplified this by omitting the four initial zeros. DOB refers to the relevant Delegates’ Order
Book; PLB to the Bartholomew Price letter books, with following volume and folio number.

Notes
1
Plato’s Republic / the Greek text edited, with notes and essays by … B. Jowett … and Lewis
Campbell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894). 3 vols.
2
Balliol College, Oxford. Jowett Papers III C 224: Benjamin Jowett to Lewis Campbell, 11 September
1893 [in the hand of Martha Knight, signed by BJ].
3
His essay ‘On the Text of Greek Authors, and Especially of Plato’ is printed at the front in the second
volume of the Republic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), iii-xxix.
4
W.W. Goodwin: Syntax of the Moods and Tenses of the Greek Verb. Revised ed. (London:
Macmillan, 1889).
5
This originally formed part of Riddell’s commentary on the Apology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1867)
and was first published separately in 1967 (Amsterdam: Hakkert). For an alternative view of Riddell’s
work, see the entry on him (by Mark Joyal) in The Dictionary of British Classicists, vol. 3 ([Bristol]:
Thoemmes Continuum, [2004]), 819-820.
6
See note 2.
7
The other two essays are ‘On the Structure of Plato’s Republic and its Relation to Other Dialogues’
and ‘On the Text of this Edition of Plato’s Republic’.
8
He cites Constantin Ritter’s Untersuchungen über Plato (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1888).
9
Johann Jakob Wagner, Wörterbuch der platonischen Philosophie (Göttingen: J.C. Dieterich, 1799);
T[homas] Mitchell, Index Graecitatis Platonicae (Oxonii: E typographeo academico, 1832). On
Timaeus, see now Timée le Sophiste, Lexique platonicien / texte, traduction et commentaire par
Maddalena Bonelli (Leiden: Brill, 2007), with additional bibliography. The introduction by Jonathan
Barnes, incorporating earlier work by Bonelli, discusses the question of authorship on p. 19-21; the
‘probable’ date-range for the Lexicon is given (30) as A.D. 150-350.
10
Platons Leben und Schriften (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1816). One of its emphases was on the
chronology of the dialogues.
11
“It was not my intention in this work to add to the total of those writings in which the text of an
ancient author serves merely as a vehicle for a load of philological and historical learning, and
accordingly my book has nothing in common with the Platonic dictionary of Timaeus Sophista and the
copious commentary on it by Ruhnken. It was my wish not exactly to explain words, but to represent
the spirit of Platonic philosophy and at the same time to supply a reliable explanatory handbook for the
reader of the writings of this philosopher. [= Es war nicht meine Absicht, durch dieses Werk die
Anzahl derjenigen Schriften zu vermehren, in welchen der Text eines alten Autors bloß zum Vehikel
für eine Last philologischer und historischer Gelehrsamkeit dient, und mein Buch hat daher mit dem
Platonischen Wörterbuche des Timaeus Sophista, und dem reichen Ruhnken’schen Commentare dazu,
gar nichts gemein. Ich wollte nicht eigentlich Worte erklären, sondern den Geist der Platonischen
Philosophie darlegen, zugleich aber auch ein brauchbares erläuterndes Handbuch für die Leser der
Schriften dieses Philosophen liefern.]” – J.J. Wagner, Wörterbuch …, Vorbericht, v-vi. Wagner’s
substantial introduction following this (xi-lxxii) is an essay in three sections: Ueber Studium der
Philosophie überhaupt, und insbesondere der alten; Kurzer Abriß der Platonischen Philosophie;
Uebersicht der Politik Plato’s.

1
12
This is despite Ast’s claim in his preface: “In vocum Platonicarum indice conficiendo omnis mea
cura versata est in hoc, ut sermonis Platonici, tam veri quam simulati (in scriptis videlicet quae Platonis
feruntur), thesaurum recluderem reclusumque ita disponerem, ut et loci Platonici et variae nominum
verborumque formae suo quaeque loco facile possent inveniri.” – Ast, Lexicon Platonicum, vol. 1
(Lipsiae: In libraria Weidmanniana, 1835), iii. The problem is also one of poor typographical layout.
13
Letter, David Binning Monro to Lewis Campbell, 13 June 1897, printed in Memorials in Verse and
Prose of Lewis Campbell / [compiled by Frances Pitt Campbell] ([London]: Printed for Private
Circulation, 1914), 362.
14
File CP38/695 [15/20]: Appeal to the Trustees of the Ireland & Craven Funds, Oxford, September
1902.
15
The other names are those of Ingram Bywater, The Provost of Oriel (D.B. Monro), Revd. Joseph
Mayor (1828-1916), Henry Jackson (1839-1921), J.G. [i.e. J.E.?] Sandys (1844-1922), James Adam
(1860-1907), Frederic George Kenyon (1863-1952), John Linton Myres (1869-1954).
16
From the Oxford and Cambridge Philological Societies, the American Philological Association, and
from Balliol College.
17
File CP38/695 [06]: Printed proposal addressed to the Delegates of the Oxford University Press,
signed Lewis Campbell, 4 May 1898. Noted at the meeting of the Delegates, 6 May 1898 (DOB 1898-
1904, p. 7, cl. 5 [1]): Bywater and Cannan asked to report; 3 June 1898 (DOB 1898-1904, p. 17, cl. 4
[1]): report submitted, consideration deferred. Cannan was to be appointed as Secretary to the
Delegates on 30 September 1898 (DOB 1898-1904, p. 41, cl. 2) in succession to Philip Lyttelton Gell
(1852-1926).
18
DOB 1898-1904, p. 27, cl. 6 (1).
19
DOB 1898-1904, p. 33, cl. 7 (2).
20
Predicted in a letter from Lewis Campbell to Sir Richard Jebb, 9 October 1898 (Jebb Papers 71); I
owe the reference to Christopher Stray. Campbell refers to the need for continuing and additional
subscriptions, at the same time calling in Jebb’s own promised £5 for three years. He notes that “I have
already spent a considerable amount of time in preparations, and have engaged a secretary, besides
purchasing copies of Ast and of the Zurich text at the cost of £23.”
21
William Sanday (1843-1920), Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity.
22
DOB 1898-1904, p. 50, cl. 5 (2).
23
File CP38/695 [12]: Extract from letter, Lewis Campbell to OUP, received 3 November 1898.
24
File CP38/695 [01]: Printed prospectus and specimen sheet; undated but date-stamped 22 November
1900.
25
Platonis opera quae feruntur omnia / recognoverunt Ioa. Geo. Baiterus, Ioa. Caspar Orellius, Aug.
Guil. Winckelmannus. Accedunt integra varietas lectionis Stephanianae, Bekkerianae, Stallbaumianae
… et scholia (Turici: Meyer et Zeller, 1839-1842). 2 vols.
26
The first volume was published in 1900, and the fifth (final) volume in 1908.
27
PLB 74, 1: Copy of letter, Charles Cannan to John Burnet, 1 November 1898. “As to the lexicon I
am still more sorry, as I thought you saw a way of getting lexicon & text together. After all you will
have 2 vols ready before anybody but St. G Stock has begun, and I don’t see why those 2 vols should
not be used at any rate. You will get to the Laws before the index maker does.” Also 74, 264: Copy of
letter, Charles Cannan to Lewis Campbell, 5 December 1898.
28
File CP38/695 [04] and [03], respectively; the latter is annotated “Copy of this sent to Prof.
Campbell 19/5/03”.
29
PLB 75, 611: Copy of letter, Charles Cannan to Lewis Campbell, 24 May 1899.
30
Bodleian Library, Oxford, Gilbert Murray Papers (MS Murray), 7 fol. 24-25. A similar letter was
sent to Mary Giles (wife of Peter Giles, Secretary of the Cambridge Philological Society) on 4 March
1900, at the time Campbell was planning a fund-raising visit to Cambridge (St Andrews University
Library, MS 30319/1).
31
PLB 72, 411: Copy of letter, Charles Cannan to Lewis Campbell, 13 May 1898.
32
PLB 73, 326: Copy of letter, Charles Cannan to Lewis Campbell, 24 August 1898.
33
File CP38/695 [21]: Letter, Lewis Campbell to Charles Cannan, 15 April 1903.
34
File CP38/695 [07]: Printed memorandum, dated 31 December 1908. A letter (CP38/695 [34]: John
Burnet to Charles Cannan, 21 November 1908) is also relevant. This refers to a new specimen page,
although there is no copy of this in the file.

2
35
Hermann Diels (1848-1922), Professor of Classical Philology at Berlin and Wilhelm Crönert (1874-
1942), the papyrologist, who began a revision of Passow’s Wörterbuch der griechischen Sprache
(Göttingen, 1913-1914).
36
File CP38/695 [36]: Letter, John Burnet to R.W. Chapman, 6 December 1908; the discussions on the
Thesaurus are described in the preface to the ninth edition of the Liddell and Scott Greek-English
Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-1940), v-vi.
37
File CP38/695 [46/48]: Copy of letter, R.W. Chapman to John Burnet, 23 April 1914.
38
File CP38/695 [62]: Copy of memorandum, R.W. Chapman to H. Milford, 22 May 1922. A later
memorandum CP38/695 [64], Chapman to Milford, 21 January 1927, refers to the priorities for the
Press by that stage: “If the enterprise were to be resuscitated, I suppose we should reply that the next
place in the long queue is occupied by the Patristic Lexicon, which we have said we will not tackle
until Liddell and Scott is out of the way … The answer to enquirers is, I think, ‘no prospect whatsoever
for twenty years’.”
39
Published posthumously as Scholia Platonica / contulerunt atque investigaverunt Fredericus De
Forest Allen, Ioannes Burnet, Carolus Pomeroy Parker; … edidit William Chase Greene ([Haverford,
Pa.]: [American Philological Association], 1938).
40
File CP38/695 [65]: Copy of letter, R.W. Chapman to Mary Burnet, 26 September 1931. Her reply
of 17 November [66] confirms that Burnet ceased working on the Lexicon “more than five years before
his death”.
41
File CP38/695 [67/68]: Copy of letter, R.W. Chapman to W.L. Lorimer, 7 December 1931.
42
File CP38/695 [69/70]: Copy of letter, R.W. Chapman to J.D. Denniston, 22 December 1931. J.D.
Denniston: The Greek Particles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), vii. As an example, Denniston points
to the entry for γε.
43
File CP38/695 [77]: Postcard, B. Snell to K. Sisam, 3 July 1948.
44
Die Ausdrücke für den Begriff des Wissens in der vorplatonischen Philosophie (Berlin: Weidmann,
1924). Burnet reviewed it in CR: 39 (1925) 126-127 and was disturbed by what he termed “its very
unhistorical character”.
45
For a detailed discussion of Picht’s life and work see Peter Noss, ‘Georg Picht’, Biographisch-
Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon, vol. 7 (Hamm, Westf.: T. Bautz, 1994), cols. 565-578; also
available at http://www.bautz.de/bbkl/p/picht_g.shtml (accessed 12/02/2007).
46
Platons Dialoge »Nomoi« und »Symposion« ([Stuttgart]: Klett-Cotta, [1990]). For Picht’s approach
to Plato more generally, see the Editorisches Nachwort by Constanze Eisenbart in this volume, 553-
561.
47
File CP38/695 [73]: Copy of letter, K. Sisam to Sir David Ross, 14 July 1948; [75], Copy of letter,
Sisam to E.R. Dodds, 16 July 1948; [74]: Letter, C.H. Roberts to Sisam, 15 July 1948; [78]: Letter,
A.D. (Lord) Lindsay to Sisam, 19 July 1948; [79]: Letter, E.R. Dodds to Sisam, 17 July 1948.
48
File CP38/695 [81]: Copy of letter, P.J. Spicer to B. Snell, 6 August 1948.
49
The earliest likely date is 1962. Richard Kannicht (now Professor emeritus at Tübingen) organised
the transport of the Archiv.
50
Platon Archiv [correspondence file], Memorandum by Konrad Gaiser, February 1972.
51
“The Plato Archive at Tübingen has come into being as the successor to the Plato Archive built up
by Georg Picht at Hinterzarten. The materials produced there during a ten-year period of activity
(1949-1959), with funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, as the basis for a new Plato
lexicon (a card-file containing the complete Platonic vocabulary) are now in Tübingen. [= Das
Tübinger Platon-Archiv tritt die Nachfolge des von Georg Picht in Hinterzarten aufgebauten Platon-
Archivs an. Die dort während zehnjähriger Arbeit (1949-1959) mit Unterstützung der Deutschen
Forschungsgemeinschaft als Grundlage für ein neues Platonlexikon erarbeiteten Materialien
(Zettelkartei mit dem gesamten Wortschatz Platons) sind nunmehr in Tübingen.]” – ibid.
52
E-mail from the author to Dr Laumont, 16 May 2006; the reply from Dr Laumont is dated 24 May.
53
Confirmed by e-mail from Frau Barbara Schönefeld (TLG, Hamburg) to the author, 16 June and 3
July 2006.
54
In addition to Dr Laumont and Frau Schönefeld, I have been in correspondence with Professor Dr
Robert Picht (Georg Picht’s eldest son), Professor em. Dr Hellmut Flashar (München), and Professor
Dr Karl-Heinz Stanzel (Tübingen), currently responsible for the Archiv at Tübingen. All were most
helpful and I wish to record my warm thanks to them. Through the good offices of Herr Bernd
Gottschlich (Forschungstätte der Evangelischen Studiengemeinschaft, Heidelberg), I was able to
contact Frau Dr Constanze Eisenbart, Picht’s assistant and amanuensis at Heidelberg, who also knew

3
the Platon-Archiv when it was still at Birklehof; Dr Eisenbart kindly took the time to show me Picht’s
own library at the FEST in Heidelberg during my visit to Germany in November 2006 and I am most
grateful to her for her valuable reminiscences and for the photograph of Georg Picht accompanying this
article.
55
Platon Archiv [correspondence file], copy of letter, Konrad Gaiser to Professor W. Jacob
(Pathologisches Institut, Univ. Heidelberg), 2 March 1971 in reply to one from Jacob, 24 February
1971; Memorandum by Konrad Gaiser, February 1972.
56
Plato / edited by Roberto Radice in collaboration with Ilaria Ramelli and Emmanuele Vimercati;
electronic edition by Roberto Bombacigno (Milano: Biblia, [2003]), 1 volume + cd-rom and
English/Italian guides.
57
In addition to the German correspondents already noted, I gratefully acknowledge the generous
assistance of Dr Martin Maw (OUP Archivist) and his staff, Dr Norman Reid of St Andrews University
Library and Dr Colin Harris, Keeper of Western Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford
and his staff. My thanks are also due to Christopher Stray for inviting me to present an initial version
of this paper at the conference held in Trinity College, Cambridge.