57. Annotations to the History of the Peloponnesian War

Herbert Weir Smyth, Eliot Professor of Greek at Harvard, 1902–25, made these notes in his copy of the Teubner edition of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War (ed. Ernst Poppo, rev. Johann Stahl, 1875–89). This page (97) contains a portion of the famous funeral oration by Pericles in Book 2, a speech that extols the virtues of Athens as much as it honors the Athenian dead.

Smyth has added several labels to the text, all written in black pen: above it, he has written Λόγος ἐπιτάφιος (“Funeral Oration”), the traditional designation for the speech; on the left hand side of the page, he added line numbers to the Greek text; and in the upper right hand corner of this page and the upper left of the page opposite, he added the numeral “43” to indicate that this was the forty-third chapter of the book. The interlinear notes made in pencil are primarily glosses on Greek words, presumably aids for translation. Below the Greek text, he has underlined in red some of the Greek headwords in the Latin commentary. This edition is interleaved with blank pages for further notes, a standard procedure in the late nineteenth century. On the facing page Smyth has written more extensive commentary on the passage, keyed to his own line numeration.

Smyth is best known for his Greek Grammar for Colleges (1920, repr. 1956), which remains a standard reference grammar, and his Loeb edition of Aeschylus (1922). Harvard acquired his copy of Thucydides after his death in 1937, when his family donated five thousand volumes from his personal collection to the Harvard Classical Library. In honor of Smyth, the library was renamed the Herbert Weir Smyth Classical Library.