Julius Pollux (, Ioulios Polydeukes; fl. 2nd century) was a Greeks scholar and rhetorician from Naucratis, Ancient Egypt.[ Encyclopædia Britannica ][John Hazel, Who's who in the Greek world, p.197, Routledge, 1999][Andrew Dalby, Food in the Ancient World: From A to Z, p.265, Routledge, 2003]
Emperor Commodus appointed him a professor-chair of rhetoric in Athens at the Academy — on account of his melodious voice, according to Philostratus' Lives of the Sophists.
Works
Pollux was the author of the
Onomasticon (Ὀνομαστικόν), a Greek
thesaurus or dictionary of
Attic Greek synonyms and phrases, in ten books, each prefaced with a dedication to the emperor Commodus. The work forms part of the
Atticism movement of the
Second Sophistic, and was intended to provide a full catalogue of the Greek vocabulary derived from classical texts that an accomplished orator could deploy. Within this movement, Pollux shows himself "a liberal and inclusive Atticist," willing to admit vocabulary from classical authors in non-Attic dialects (like
Herodotus), from post-classical works (such as
New Comedy and
Hellenistic historiography), and from contemporary spoken Greek. The entries in the work are arranged not alphabetically but according to subject-matter. Pollux claims that the exact order of subjects is random, but contemporary scholarship has discerned organisational patterns based on "the paradigmatic relationships at the heart of Romano-Greek society." For example, Book 5 is divided into two halves, the first of which deals with words relating to hunting and the second half of which Pollux calls "eclectic" (e.g. the entries in 5.148-5.152 are:
proischesthai "to hold forth",
grammata en stelais "writing on steles",
diakores "satiated",
anamphibolon "unambiguous"), but, within this eclecticism, Zadorojnyi nevertheless notes a tendency to focus on binary oppositions like love and hate, praise and denunciation.
It supplies much rare and valuable information on many points of classical antiquity
Nothing of his rhetorical works has survived, except some of their titles (in the Suda).
Contemporary reception
Pollux was probably the person satirized by
Lucian as a worthless and ignorant person who gains a reputation as an orator by sheer effrontery, and pilloried in his
Lexiphanes, a satire upon the affectation of obscure and obsolete words.
Editions
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1502, ed. by Aldus Manutius in Venice. Re-edited at 1520 by Lucantonio Giunta and at 1536 by Simon Grynaeus in Basel.
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1900–1967, ed. E. Bethe, Leipzig (Teubner). Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3.
Translations
A
Latin translation made by
Rudolf Gwalther was published in Basel at 1541 and made Julius Pollux more available to
Renaissance Antiquary and scholars, and anatomists, who adopted obscure Greek words for parts of the body.
Bibliography
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Encyclopædia Britannica, 1999
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Cinzia Bearzot, Franca Landucci, Giuseppe Zecchini (ed.), L'Onomasticon di Giulio Polluce. Tra lessicografia e antiquaria. Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 2007. Pp. viii, 173 (Contributi di storia antica, 5)
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External links
