¹ E. Bethe (ed.), Pollucis Onomasticon, 3 vols. (Leipzig, 1900–1937), 1.xviii.

² For text, see Bethe (n. 1); and for helpful summary in the context of other related works, see E. Dickey, Ancient Greek Scholarship (Oxford, 2007), 96. For all of the passages I discuss in detail the reading I follow, from Bethe's text, is based on broad agreement among all the surviving manuscripts, despite some minor variations.

³ For good discussion of Pollux in his atticizing context, in relation to the other lexicographers, see C. Strobel, ‘The lexica of the Second Sophistic: safeguarding Atticism’, in A. Georgakopoulou and M. Silk (edd.), Standard Languages and Language Standards: Greek, Past and Present (Farnham, 2009), 93–107, and ‘Studies in Atticistic lexica of the second and third centuries a.d.’ (Diss., University of Oxford, 2011), 207–59.

⁴ For that broader context of Atticism, see S. Swain, Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, AD 50–250 (Oxford, 1996), 17–64; L. Kim, ‘The literary heritage as language: Atticism and the Second Sophistic’, in E.J. Bakker (ed.), A Companion to the Ancient Greek Language (Malden, MA, 2010), 468–82, esp. 476–8.

⁵ See Swain (n. 4), 53–5; Dickey (n. 2), 96–7.

⁶ See Swain (n. 4), 51–3; Dickey (n. 2), 98.

⁷ For a helpful overview, see J. Zecchini, ‘Polluce e la politica culturale di Commodo’, in C. Bearzot, F. Landucci and J. Zecchini (edd.), L'Onomasticon di Giulio Polluce: tra lessicografia e antiquaria (Milan, 2007), 17–26.

⁸ See J. König, Saints and Symposiasts: The Literature of Food and the Symposium in Greco-Roman and Early Christian Culture (Cambridge, 2012), 66–75.

⁹ See L. Holford-Strevens, Aulus Gellius: An Antonine Scholar and his Achievement (Oxford, 2003²), 34.

¹⁰ See I. Marchesi, The Art of Pliny's Letters: A Poetics of Allusion in the Private Correspondence (Cambridge, 2008), 22–7.

¹¹ It is contradicted not least by his claims in the prefaces to Books 7 and 9, in both of which he talks in passing about the order he has imposed on his material.

¹² See P. Binkley (ed.), Pre-Modern Encyclopaedic Texts: Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Groningen, 1–4 July 1996 (Leiden, 1997), esp. the chapter by R.L. Fowler, ‘Encyclopaedias: definitions and theoretical problems’, 3–29; J. König and G. Woolf, ‘Encyclopaedism in the Roman Empire’, in J. König and G. Woolf (edd.), Encyclopaedism from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Cambridge, 2013), 23–63.

¹³ See König and Woolf (n. 12), 52–8.

¹⁴ Cf. D. Brewer, ‘The Encyclopédie: innovation and legacy’, in J. Fowler (ed.), New Essays on Diderot (Cambridge, 2011), 47–58, at 51 for the importance of cross-referencing to the encyclopaedism of the Enlightenment; and C. Rubincam, ‘The organization of material in Graeco-Roman world histories’, in Binkley (n. 12), 127–36, at 133–4, for similar techniques in other ancient ‘encyclopaedic’ writing, with special reference to Diodorus Siculus and Pliny the Elder.

¹⁵ For a helpful brief overview, see R. Tosi, ‘Polluce: struttura onomastica e tradizione lessicografica’, in Bearzot, Landucci and Zecchini (n. 7), 3–16.

¹⁶ For example, see the preface to Onomasticon Book 10, where Pollux mentions that he has consulted the Skeuographicon of Eratosthenes—a treatise on tools—as a source, expressing his disappointment and his conviction that his own work is better.

¹⁷ See M. Hatzimichali, ‘Encyclopaedism in the Alexandrian library’, in König and Woolf (n. 12), 64–83, at 75–82, for the influence of Hellenistic Alexandrian lexicography on the development of encyclopaedic styles of composition, esp. 79: ‘this situation presents serious challenges for any attempt to draw a line between lexicon and encyclopaedia, because the project of analysing and examining the import of a language in its totality (including the realia behind the words) bears a striking equivalence to the quest for universal knowledge’; also H. Béjoint, The Lexicography of English: From Origins to Present (Oxford, 2010), 27–8 and 36–8 for arguments in modern lexicography that dictionaries and encyclopaedias are hard to distinguish.

¹⁸ For example, see König (n. 8), 112–16 on the lengthy list of vocabulary for drinking vessels in Book 11.

¹⁹ See, among many others, C. Jacob, ‘Ateneo, o il dedalo delle parole’, in L. Canfora (ed.), Ateneo, I deipnosofisti: I dotti a banchetto (Rome, 2001), xi-cxxi, at lxxi-lxxxiii.

²⁰ See E. Dickey, The Colloquia of the Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana. Vol. 1, Colloquia Monacensia-Einsidlensia, Leidense-Stephani, and Stephani (Cambridge, 2012).

²¹ See Dickey (n. 20), esp. 21, figure 1.2.

²² P. Rance, Review of Bearzot, Landucci and Zecchini (n. 7), BMCR 2008.11.28 describes it as ‘the oldest specimen of encyclopaedism transmitted from antiquity’.

²³ For example, see König and Woolf (n. 12), 40–4, with further bibliography.

²⁴ For a useful survey of Isidore's sources, see S.A. Barney, W.J. Lewis, J.A. Beach and O. Berghof (edd.), The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville (translated with introduction and notes) (Cambridge, 2006), 10–17.

²⁵ J. Henderson, The Medieval World of Isidore of Seville: Truth from Words (Cambridge, 2007), 2.

²⁶ See esp. Henderson (n. 25), 5; and for more extensive discussion of Roget's Thesaurus, and of the traditions of synonymy lying behind it, see W. Hüllen, A History of Roget's Thesaurus: Origins, Development, and Design (Oxford, 2004), esp. 77–96 on classical precedents (although oddly without any mention of Pollux), and 331–7 on the text's ‘macrostructure’.

²⁷ For instance, see J. König and T. Whitmarsh, ‘Ordering knowledge’, in J. König and T. Whitmarsh (edd.), Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire (Cambridge, 2007), 3–39, at 32–4; A. Zadorojnyi, ‘The aesthetics and politics of inscriptions in Imperial Greek literature’, in A. Petrovic, I. Petrovic and E. Thomas (edd.), Materiality of Inscriptions (Leiden, forthcoming).

²⁸ M. Poliakoff, Studies in the Terminology of Greek Combat Sports (Frankfurt, 1986).

²⁹ Many of the essays in Bearzot, Landucci and Zecchini (n. 7) demonstrate the same phenomenon for other topics within the Onomasticon, for example in relation to legal, political and military terminology.

³⁰ For an overview, see J. König, ‘Regimen and athletic training’, in G. Irby-Massie (ed.), Blackwell Companion to Greek Science, Medicine, and Technology (Oxford, 2016), 450–64.

³¹ See J. König, Athletics and Literature in the Roman Empire (Cambridge, 2005), 254–300.

³² See König (n. 31), 301–44; J. Rusten and J. König, Philostratus, Heroicus and Gymnasticus (Loeb Classical Library Series) (Cambridge, MA, 2014), 333–93.

³³ Cf. A. Maffi, ‘L’Onomasticon di Polluce come fonte di diritto attico’, in Bearzot, Landucci and Zecchini (n. 7), 29–42 for similar conclusions in relation to Pollux’ collection of legal terms in Book 8.

³⁴ However, see König (n. 31), 70 for ἐπιμεληταί as deputies to gymnasiarchs who are unable to handle the day-to-day organization of the gymnasium themselves.

³⁵ ἐπόπτης is also used at Onomasticon 2.58 for someone who presides over mysteries.

³⁶ See König (n. 31) for an account of the importance of athletic activity to the literature and culture of the Imperial period, with extensive discussion of the relationship between literary and epigraphical representations.

³⁷ See Theodoridis, C., ‘Weitere Bemerkungen zum Onomastikon des Julius Pollux’, ZPE 143 (2003), 71–8Google Scholar, at 76 for the suggestion that Pollux may have used a (non-athletic) monument as a source for one particular word, listed at 10.60; if that is right, it suggests that Pollux was in principle open to engagement with epigraphical language.

³⁸ Pleket, H.W., ‘Games, prizes, athletes and ideology: some aspects of the history of sport in the Greco-Roman world’, Stadion 1 (1975), 49–89 Google Scholar offers a survey of many of the words listed here. For a parallel for Pollux’ neglect of these modern terms, see the quotation by Philostratus from one of Pollux’ speeches in VS 2.12, 593, where he similarly seems to have a very classicizing vision of traditional Panhellenic festival culture.

³⁹ However, for the word περίοδος, which is used over and over again in the athletic texts of the Imperial period to refer to the ‘grand slam’, i.e. the circuit of most prestigious festival contests, see Onomasticon 4.89.

⁴⁰ See 10.164 for a very brief exception.

⁴¹ For example, see Philostratus, Gymnasticus 42.

⁴² See Arist. Pol. 1339a, using the word ἀναγκοφαγία; Gal. Protrepticus 28.

⁴³ Intriguingly the structure of this section of the text, starting with the agonothete and ending with the athletic trainer, echoes the kind of arrangement we often find in ephebic inscriptions from this period, where the gymnasiarch is named, as benefactor, right at the beginning of the inscription, followed by the names of the ephebes, with the trainer, the παιδοτρίβης, taking final position, in a way which is certainly not in that context meant to belittle him, but certainly sets him decisively apart from the benefactor in first position: see König (n. 31), 309–11 for longer discussion, with reference especially to I.Delos 1922–40.

⁴⁴ See Robert, L., ‘Un citoyen de Téos à Bouthrôtos d’Épire’, CRAI (1974), 508–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar (= L. Robert, Opera Minora Selecta, 5.675-96). The word ἐπιστάτης is used in Onomasticon 3.145, but apparently to mean ‘umpire’, paired with βραβευτάς.

⁴⁵ See Crowther, N.B., ‘Flogging as punishment in the ancient games’, Nikephoros 11 (1998), 51–82 Google Scholar (= N.B. Crowther, Athletika: Studies on the Olympic Games and Greek Athletics [Hildesheim, 2004], 141–60).

⁴⁶ There is brief mention of words connected with regimen in the medical section of Book 4, through Pollux’ use of the word δίαιτα at 4.177 and 4.180, but the vast majority of medical terms there is drawn from therapeutic rather than preservative medicine. It is striking, for example, that there is no mention of terms associated with massage anywhere in the Onomasticon: massage was a major sub-field of medical and gymnastic writing on regimen.

⁴⁷ For one other sign that the process of giving instruction on technique would not have been viewed as a particularly sophisticated activity, see P.Oxy. 466, which preserves fragments of a manual on wrestling technique, using colloquial athletic jargon in a way which is bare and functional and lacking in literary pretensions: see Poliakoff (n. 28), 161–3 for text and translation.

⁴⁸ See also 4.47 for a list of words used for denigrating sophists; also Swain (n. 4), 97.

⁴⁹ For other brief mentions of athletic activity in the work which enhance this impression of the gymnasium as a classical elite institution, see 5.23, where Pollux compares a particular hunting stance with the movements one uses in wrestling, and 9.43, where he includes gymnasium and bath buildings in an account of city vocabulary, quoting from Eupolis, Lysias and Xenophon.

⁵⁰ Isidore, Etymologies Book 20 similarly stands as the last book of that work, and deals mainly with tools and furniture: see Henderson (n. 25), 207–9.

⁵¹ That image of usefulness is repeated from the opening sentences of the preface: Pollux explains that he has been motivated to compose Book 10 by the disappointment he felt in reading the Skeuographicon (Treatise on tools) of Eratosthenes, having being initially attracted to it by the prospect of its usefulness. He also states the usefulness (χρείαν) of his own work in the preface to Book 9.

⁵² Cf. Dickey (n. 20), 3 and 225 for another blatantly elitist inventory of words related to getting up, in the glossary tradition discussed already above: ‘I got up / in the morning / having been woken up, / and I called a slave boy. / I told him to open / the window …’.

⁵³ Cf. König (n. 8), 112–19 for the similar inventory of vocabulary for drinking vessels in Ath. Deipn. Book 11, the difference being that Athenaeus focusses almost exclusively on vocabulary linked with elite drinking practices.

⁵⁴ See K. Dunbabin, The Roman Banquet: Images of Conviviality (Cambridge, 2003), 166–9.

⁵⁵ ‘But if some of the words now spoken have been included here too [i.e. in addition to words from specially named classical sources], do not be entirely surprised; for it was necessary for me, in gathering the names of tools, to collect them not only from ancient authors but also from my own experience’ (εἰ δέ τινα τῶν νῦν εἰρημένων κἀν τούτῳ γέγραπται, μὴ πάνυ θαυμάσῃς· ἀθροίζοντα γὰρ τὰς τῶν σκευῶν προσηγορίας οὐκ ἐκ τῶν παλαιῶν συλλέγειν μόνον ἀλλὰ κἀκ τῶν ἰδίων ἔδει).