A definitive modern critical edition of the lexicon required over half a century of collaborative philological labor.

Reconstructing Hesychius’s text demanded an epoch-making editorial effort spanning decades. Begun by Kurt Latte, who published volume one in 1953 and volume two posthumously in 1966, the critical edition was continued by Peter Allan Hansen and Ian C. Cunningham. Volumes three and four were published in 2005 and 2009 respectively, providing the first detailed paleographical report of the unique Venice manuscript and systematically isolating later Byzantine Christian interpolations from the original classical stratum.