ABSTRACT
This chapter combines a meditation on the politics of Greek-English lexicography with a proposal for a speculative pedagogical collaboration called the Anti-Lexicon. The essential aim of the Anti-Lexicon is to challenge and expand the range of meanings that make themselves available to 21st-century students and scholars of ancient languages and cultures, with awareness of the implicit exclusionary ideologies that have operated within the history of the discipline of classics. The essay follows the following structure: (1) introduction to some key lexicographical works and their institutional contexts, (2) the socio-political urgency of rethinking how we teach and think about the meanings of ancient words, with a case study of the Homeric epithet for Hephaestus, Amphiguēeis, and (3) a speculative pedagogical model for thinking about how students of ancient languages might collaborate to form a complementary base of knowledge – the Anti-Lexicon – which could work alongside the lexicon to reshape disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to linguistic meaning.
