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This paper reports the first steps of a project that aims to offer an open-access online database in which users will be able to see, analyze, and calculate how meters are used throughout Greek and Roman theater.

Since the creation of online databases of Classical texts such as Perseus and the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, various projects have sought to expand such databases to include metrical information (Chamberlain, Columbi et al., Fusi, Moore, Tueller). Building on these projects, the author of this paper and colleagues and student assistants are working to create an online, open access database that presents and analyzes the metrical patterns of all Greek and Roman drama.

We have begun with Euripides, recognizing that Euripides’ corpus is the largest in ancient drama aside from Plautus’, and that his use of music marks a key transition between the chorus-centered techniques characteristic of earlier Greek drama and the domination of actors’ monodies in later theater (Csapo, Wilson, Hall).

We begin with xml versions of each play’s Greek text and translation, drawn from perseus.tufts.edu. The Greek text is adjusted manually to match the scansion of Euripidean lyrics in Frederico Lourenço’s The Lyric Metres of Euripidean Drama. By means of a Python file that builds on James Tauber’s Greek accentuation library and Anna Conser’s Greek scansion program, each syllable of the play is identified and tagged as long or short. Manual corrections are made as necessary. Additional tags and milestones are added indicating speaker changes, meters, metra/cola, periods, and basic divisions of the play (the last following Aichele).

Several files are then applied to the xml file to create a web site that shows scansion throughout the plays, displays metrical patterns in ways easy to comprehend, and allows one to see numerous statistical features of the tragedian’s use of meter. The web site’s structure and style are created by an HTML file and a CSS file. A central JavaScript file controls everything that changes or updates the web page. Two other JavaScript files interact to display and update a page of statistics. Json files generate the navigational grid, keep track of meters used in the play, connect the Greek text and the translation, and associate the names of characters with information such as their gender and status.

The database currently includes Hekabe and Orestes. It allows a user to see the scansion of each verse in each of these plays, as well as to find easily meters, types of meter, and   metrical patterns, and to discover such features as the distribution of meters by individual character and by characters’ gender, status, and ethnicity.

 The next major task for the project’s builders, in addition to adding more plays, will be to develop ways of tracking and calculating metrical use across plays and playwrights.  The author is eager for suggestions from session participants on how best to proceed as the database expands in the years ahead.