Review: Cambridge Grammar of Classical Greek (2019)

The Cambridge Grammar of Classical Greek, by Evert van Emde Boas, Albert Rijksbaron, Luuk Huitink and Mathieu de Bakker (CUP 2019), paperback, pp xlii + 811, £29.99, ISBN 9780521127295

This has been a long-awaited title. I ordered my copy from Amazon over a year ago, and publication was deferred almost on a monthly basis between then and this March, when the book finally appeared. It was worth the wait.

For most of us the late James Morwood’s Oxford Grammar of Classical Greek (2001, £7.99), modest in scope, size and price, will serve our daily needs. For specialists and keen enthusiasts something like the new CGCG, as it will no doubt become known, is long overdue.

It was in 1902 that John Thompson published his Grammar of Attic Greek, which has been through periodic reiterations since then and remains a thorough piece of work and a useful reference. But the last thorough survey was that of Herbert Weir Smyth, colleague of the famous Gildersleeve and successor at Harvard as Professor of Greek Literature at Harvard to William Goodwin, he of Syntax of the Moods and Voices of the Greek Verbs fame (1860, revised 1899; not a catchy title, but the book is profuse in its citations).

In 1920 Smyth’s Greek Grammar appeared. Like its predecessors, it acknowledged the debt owed to Victorian German scholarship, notably Raphael Kühner’s encyclopaedic Ausführliche Grammatik der griechischen Sprache, originally in two volumes (1834–35), an enlarged third edition in four volumes being produced by Friedrich Blass and Bernhard Gerth between 1890 and 1904. It is noteworthy that Kühner appears in the CGCG’s thorough bibliography, also. So, with Smyth’s grammar having appeared in 1920 it is only a marginal, and certainly pardonable, exaggeration for the first line of the CGCG’s blurb to state “This is the first full-scale grammar of classical Greek in English in a century.” The inclusion of the word Cambridge in the title appears to be something of a paradox, the four co-authors hailing from Oxford, Amsterdam, and Heidelberg.

All credit to Cambridge University Press for committing to this project back in 2009. The scope of CGCG is specifically stated, yet easily overlooked in the title: Classical. You will not find a treatment of New Testament Greek here, nor of Homeric or other dialects, or of metre, or of interjections; these are left to other reference works. Thanks to Herodotus there is a treatment of Ionic prose, and attention is paid to some dialectal aspects of drama. The most fascinating aspect of CGCG is its up-to-date approach, whilst maintaining the traditional features of a Greek grammar.

There are not thousands of numbered, cross-referenced paragraphs; just 61 – with plenty of sub-paragraphs, of course; the cross-referencing remains abundant. The initial sections on phonology and morphology are, as expected, followed by one on syntax. But among novel inclusions is a section on textual coherence (text types, particles, word order), and one of sample passages of four text types: narrative (Lysias), description (Xenophon), argument (Plato), and dialogue (Sophocles). Each of these consists of an introduction, the sample text and a perceptive commentary.

There are three comprehensive indices: an index locorum of cited examples – which are all accompanied by modern, idiomatic English translations; subjects; and Greek words. It is worth mentioning that the examples are all from original sources; there are no ‘confected’ examples. These indices, and the cross-referencing, combine to make this volume a pleasure to navigate in pursuit of specific lines of enquiry, or simply to dip into and explore at leisure; there will be an interesting nugget to be gleaned from every page.

I have not long been exploring CGCG, but its treatment of that old chestnut, prepositions (31.8), is a good example of a fresh approach and layout, each word being treated under three headings: spatial, temporal and abstract. Some will be thrown by the case order of the morphology section. It is the ‘non-English’, or ‘old’ order of nom, gen, dat, acc, voc. I assume this is with the potential sales market areas in mind. It is easy enough to bear, but there is an on-line resources page to accompany the CGCG, from which can be downloaded a pdf of all the tables, in ‘English’ case order if you wish, for reference. This is a bargain resource: it cost me £0.53. If the topic of case-order is one that excites you, I recommend the thorough treatment of the legendary W. S. Allen and C. O. Brink: The Old Order and the New: A Case History, in Lingua 50 (1980), pp. 61-100.

Ten years in the gestation alone, this is a much needed and long overdue exposition of modern advances in linguistics as applied to classical Greek, and totally thorough and comprehensive in its treatment. I cannot, at present, see it being surpassed. These are only my initial impressions, and I am looking forward to many happy hours of dipping in to these 800+ pages over the months and years ahead. On a broader spectrum, these are exciting times for Greek freaks. For more than a year now my go-to Greek dictionary has no longer been LSJ but The Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek (2015, nearly 2500 pages, £73.00 hardback; a pleasure to use). For more in-depth stuff I use Leiden’s Etymological Dictionary of Greek (2016, two volumes, 1800+ pages, c. £76.00, another delightful tool). And, of course, the Cambridge Greek Lexicon, 15 years in the making, is due for publication later this year.

This review was first published in the SATIPS Classics Broadsheet (Summer 2019). Back issues, with more reviews, comment and insights can be found here.