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THE NEW PAULY
THE NEW PAULY Hubert Cancik and Helmuth Schneider (edd.), Der Neue Pauly: Enzyklopädie der Antike in 15 Bänden und l Registerband. Band I: A - Ari. Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag, 1996. PD. 1154. ISBN 3-476-01471-1. DM268.00.
Der Neue Pauly enjoys a noble ancestry. The first volume of the RealEncyclopädie der classischen Alterthumswissenschafi appeared in 1839, edited by August Pauly, eight years after the death of Hegel and seven after that of Goethe. When Pauly died in 1845, Christian Waltz and Wilhelm Teuffei completed the work in 1852. It then comprised six volumes; its second edition, started between 1861 and 1866, was never finished; the explosion of knowledge had set in. In 1890 Georg Wissowa started a new edition, conceived on a broader scale, which was expected to be completed in approximately ten years. Its first volume came out in 1894 but the last not until 1978, to be finally followed by an index volume in 1980. No fewer than eighty-four thick, impressive volumes span approximately three metres on the shelf and three millennia in chronology. Since the work took almost three generations to complete, the work as a whole is extremely uneven: here Apollo and Zeus do not sit in the same Olympus; hence the need for an update.
This mega biblion costs between one-half and one year of an academic salary. Considerably less expensive is Der Kleine Pauly, once again in six volumes. It partly contains no more than summaries of the mega-edition, partly valuable new information. Produced between the years 1964 and 1975, it has been available in a pocket-book edition since 1979. In addition, a microfiche edition of the eighty-four volumes has been on the market since 1991. And now one hundred years after the beginning of the mega-encyclopaedia comes the latest offspring of this admirable family tree, Der Neue Pauly. What is 'new' about it? First, its size: the new edition is planned to comprise twelve volumes and to be rounded out by three more documenting the classical tradition ('Wirkungsgeschichte', 'Wissenschaftsgeschichte'). In other words, the new Pauly sits comfortably in the middle: it is about a fifth or sixth of the old big edition and two and one-half times the size of...