Chris Weimer notes that Perseus Digital Library has updated its Latin offerings and now includes more texts from Cicero, as well as texts from Seneca, Quintilian, Flaccus, Aulus Gellius, Ammianus and Petronius. While most of them seem to be “outdated” texts, it still is nice to have them around. The other good news is that since they are older texts, a lot of them are in the public domain. I haven’t looked as much at the English translations (not every Greek or Latin text on Perseus has an English translation available on the website), so I can’t comment a lot on their quality, but some of them look like Loeb translations. The overall implementation of this update is not as glamorous (look for instance at the way it handles Aulus Gellius) as some of the other Perseus versions, but I suppose it is better than nothing.

No word on what other texts might be added at Perseus nor when one can hope to see these same texts implemented on the Perseus under PhiloLogic website. If anyone hears anything, let me know.

In the absence of seeing anyone else comment on this, I figured I might as well put my paddle in the water. I’ve previously mentioned that the Perseus databases are also available in a different form via the Perseus under PhiloLogic website. As much as the Perseus website has improved over the years, I still find I use the PhiloLogic version quite a bit because of its quickness and ability to do searches more efficiently. The PhiloLogic website notes that the site is in its “beta” version which debuted in Spring 2008. Previous to that it was in an “alpha” version. If there was a version before that I can’t recall.

In any case, I see that a transition to the “gamma” version, referred to as the “Greek morphology release” is now available at a different web address. I am not sure if there will be a point in time at which the beta version will disappear and this will take its place or what, but I’m guessing that if you’ve used the old PhiloLogic website, you’ll want to update your links to this newer version in the meanwhile.

From the website, here are the main improvements:

• Newly added: You can now search for lemmas (e.g., lemma:λέγω) and morphological characteristics (see below for details). Help us make the morphological analysis better by voting on the correct parses (a click will bring up the morphology window) and reporting problems.
• At popular request, we have moved translations to separate browser windows.

In the past I have been a fan of PhiloLogic’s website. This improved version should be even better, but for now consider this less a raving review than an FYI. Take a look around their website and see whether you think this is a step forward.

Fortunately we have now passed through the dark side and our blog has been restored. Thanks again to users for helping us out with lost files. The digital age has only further underscored our need for redundancy. Lost zeros and ones are just as hard to replicate as are lost pieces of paper.

Now a new version for the history majors and fans of Greek classical prose: Thucydides! Thucydides forms half of the two-part Greek historian combo that is famous even in our day (Herodotus is the other half, duh!). Of course these were not the only historians around, but their works have established them as pillars of the study of history. Thucydides writes about the history of the Peloponnesian War which took place in the 5th century BC in Greece. If you want to read more about Thucydides or this work I would suggest Wikipedia as a good starting point (I liked the basic outline contained therein). Maybe it’s biased and inaccurate, guess you’ll have to compare what you learn there with other sources! See. Wikipedia encourages further study!

Now there’s good news and bad news. First the good news: This release contains two different English translations of Thucydides. Now you can have more than one viewpoint in order to work through the text.

The bad news. I have been unable to find a public domain source of the Greek text of Thucydides. Perseus contains a nice Greek text, but it is from a 1942 Oxford Press edition, which to the best of my knowledge would still be in copyright. Now you can still make for your own personal use a Greek edition from the Perseus text, but that is a rather complicated process. However, if someone can come up with a public domain Greek text, I will see about converting it and making it available on the blog here. Until then, I hope something is better than nothing!

DOWNLOAD - Thucydides English version 1

DOWNLOAD - Thucydides English version 2