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Complete Online Suda

Posted: Wed Jul 30, 2014 2:47 pm
by Stephan Huller

Re: Complete Online Suda

Posted: Wed Jul 30, 2014 5:17 pm
by ficino
Wow, good to know about. I usually just use the TLG, but it's great to learn about this, thanks.

Re: Complete Online Suda

Posted: Fri Aug 01, 2014 7:56 am
by DCHindley
ficino wrote:Wow, good to know about. I usually just use the TLG, but it's great to learn about this, thanks.
It is a pretty big deal, yes. The TLG is excellent for source searches, but few outside of academia have access. The Suda is also very interesting, often hinting at things in long lost sources that we were not previously aware, but it is, I think, a 10th century CE "dictionary."

I had used it several times in its early days, but have not looked at it for a good while. An unnecessarily hostile exchange with one of the folks connected with it (what an arrogant peacock he was) has left a bad taste, but I can't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
A mother was washing her baby one night,
The youngest of ten and a delicate mite.
The mother was poor and the baby was thin,
'Twas naught but an skelingtin covered with skin.

The mother turned 'round for a soap off the rack.
She was only a moment but when she turned back
Her baby had gone, and in anguish she cried,
"Oh, where 'as my baby gone?" The angels replied:

Oh, your baby has gone down the plug 'ole.
Oh, your baby has gone down the plug.
The poor little thing was so skinny and thin,
He should 'ave been washed in a jug, in a jug.

Your baby is perfectly happy;
He won't need a bath anymore.
He's a-muckin' about with the angels above,
Not lost but gone before.
Cream, Mother's Lament.
Writer(s): Ginger Baker, Jack Bruce, Eric Patrick Clapton
Copyright: Dratleaf Music Ltd. (1968 or 69?)
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/cream/motherslament.html

DCH (yes boss, lunch is over, back to work boss)

Re: Complete Online Suda

Posted: Fri Aug 01, 2014 9:28 am
by ficino
The Suda is important for the info it gives, as you guys have pointed out. It's also important for attempts to reconstruct works of scholarship produced during the Roman period, which in turn rested heavily on the great Alexandrian commentaries. I won't bore people by expatiating on this, but anyone who is interested in ancient scholarship, as it can be reconstructed from Byzantine compilations like the Suda, can learn a lot from Eleanor Dickey's Ancient Greek Scholarship.

Back in '49 or '50. Hartmut Erbse published a now hard-to-get reconstruction of the 2nd-century lexica of Aelius Dionysius and Pausanias the Atticist. Other people have continued along those lines. A good hypothesis for any given gloss is that if it is found both in the Suda and in Photius' lexicon, it probably stood in the so-called Συναγωγή λέξεων, which in turn drew from earlier lexica like the one on (or by?) Cyril, and the Atticist lexica before that.

OK, I'll shut up now. Couldn't resist because am finishing up a project in which I made a lot of use of this material.

The Suda, of course, gives more than lexical entries, which is why it's so cool. It's long article on Socrates, for starters...