Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd edition)
Windows CD-Rom £47 Oxford University Press
To assess the worth of a reference book, you have to live with it for a while and note how well it comes to your aid when you need it. Until then, the best you can do is a bit of random tasting, which is what I did with the third edition of the Oxford Classical Dictionary published on CD-rom by the Oxford University Press and powered by Versaware.
Mostly it lived up to expectations. I took, for a start, two famous double acts, one from history and one from legend: the political rivals Marius and Scylla, and the perils to Odysseus Scylla and Charybdis. The entries combined the scholarly with the readable. Scylla and Charybdis used often to be called into service where nowadays we would talk of being between a rock and a hard place: in other words, if one didn't get you the other one would. Charybdis is defined as whirlpool or maelstrom in a narrow channel of the sea ("later identified with the Straits of Messina, where there is nothing of the kind": thank you for that), while Scylla is conjured out of the deeps with relish: a fantastic monster with 12 feet and six heads who lurked in a cave situated high up on a cliff opposite Charybdis, "darting her necks out like a kind of multiple Moray eel to seize dolphins, sharks and passing sailors... in art, her dogheads are transposed to her waist, freeing her upper body to become an alluring woman, while her lower body becomes fishy." Delightful. Marius and Sulla aren't quite so much fun but have meaty, reliable entries.
The real joy in each case, and where the CD scores mightily over the books, is the way each entry is peppered with cross references to which you can switch in less time than it used to take Scylla to gobble up some poor mariner.
Could it be just a touch austere? Julius Caesar is listed as Iulius Caesar. I looked up Aeschylus, but found no account of his death, which my ancient reference books say occurred when an eagle dropped a tortoise it was carrying on the poor fellow's old bald head, mistaking it for an egg and hoping to use the tortoise to break it. Still, I learned quite a lot while looking up tortoise: that Hermes on his first day of life found one and transformed it into a lyre before going off and stealing Apollo's cattle; that the tortoise and half-tortoise were part of the Attic system of weights; and that there used to be an old joke about a scholastikos who brought a raven in the hope of testing claims that it lived to 200 years. "A very similar story" the OCD adds with the sort of quirkiness which lights up a good reference book, "is related of a modern politician who took up tortoise-keeping in retirement". But it does not say who this was. Very frustrating.
Frustrating too is the way that a segment called Gallery holds out the promise of all sorts of multimedia treats, and yet there are none when you get there - presumably because the OCD has been spatchcocked into a pre-ordained Versaware formula which it does not quite fit. As the instruction book oddly says: "Gallery view allows you to view your media items - there are no media items in OCD on CD-rom." Otherwise, though, I think we have the firm expectation here of many happy hours of instruction and enjoyment.
