reviews

Logeion allows searches of a series of Greek and Latin dictionaries and classical reference works. It was developed beginning in 2011 at the University of Chicago by students Josh Goldenberg and Matt Shanahan under the direction of Professor Helma Dik, and regularly adds new features and resources. Inspired by the innovative Dictionnaire vivant de la langue française, also based at the University of Chicago, it began with a nucleus of several reference works originally digitized by Perseus.

EAGLE, the Electronic Archive of Greek and Latin Epigraphy, was conceived in 1997 by the Italian Epigrapher Silvio Panciera (1933–2016). Based at Sapienza — Università di Roma, it appeared under the aegis of the Association Internationale d’Épigraphie Grecque et Latine (AIEGL) and an international steering committee. The site launched in 2003, with the goal of providing a gateway for the search of all Greek and Latin inscriptions.

It began with a collaboration of four major databases of Roman inscriptions. Briefly:

Papyri.info is a resource for the study of documentary papyri with two parts. The first, the Papyrological Navigator (PN), whose development began in 2006, aims to integrate and allow simultaneous querying of five existing papyrological databases. The focus thus far is on Greek and Latin texts, with selective inclusion of Coptic. A later development, the Papyrological Editor (PE), launched in 2010, offers the facility for users to contribute directly, in the form of corrections to entered data, new data entry, in particular new text editions, and even “born digital” editions of their own, all reviewed by an editorial board.

The Homer Multitext (HMT) has something in common with the poetry it documents: They are both monumental and impressive works whose gradual evolution over many years by many hands has left traces of its past; it exists in several forms that present the same information in slightly different ways, and its development through changing technologies has left occasional redundancies. Like the Iliad, it lives up to its title, but perhaps not in the way one expects. And like its poetic source text, it richly rewards those who plumb its depths.

Jacoby Online is a monumental resource encompassing several separate projects, all of them related to Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker (FGrH) of Felix Jacoby (1876–1959). The original reference work aimed to collect, edit, and comment on all the known testimonies[1] and fragments of ancient Greek historians whose works survive incomplete. At the time of his death, Jacoby had produced fifteen print volumes covering 856 historians, distributed among three of five proposed areas: (I) genealogy and mythography, (II) history (Zeitgeschichte), and (III) local history (Horographie) and ethnography.

Editor’s note: The guidelines under review here, while publicly available for comment, represent a pre-release version.

Roman Inscriptions of Britain is a digitally-enhanced version of R.G. Collingwood and R.P. Wright’s Roman Inscriptions of Britain, vol. 1 (1965), and its 2,400 inscriptions. It includes all subsequent Addenda and Corrigenda to volume 1. Volumes 2 (1990–1995, instrumentum domesticum) and 3 (2009, more recent finds) are not yet available online, but all the major Roman inscriptions of Britain are included here. Since the work of editing, preparing, and composing commentary for the inscriptions had already been done, the site’s creator, Scott Vanderbilt, could focus the interface, and on applying TEI and EpiDoc markups.

A Mid-Republican House at Gabii is an ambitious project. It extends the born-digital movement in archaeology, in that the final publication of an excavation is a website with an ISBN and long-term hosting by the University of Michigan. In addition to a traditional presentation of the finds, the publication includes the full excavation database disseminated through the Archaeological Recording Kit (ARK). The resource also presents the architectural remains and contexts in an interactive 3-D environment, coded using the gaming platform Unity. The latter two components of this forward-looking publication especially merit review as a digital project. Does the Gabii publication represent a competitive alternative to the traditional format of the excavation monograph?

Intermediate Latin students typically encounter Latin poetry for the first time with Vergil’s Aeneid. After a brief tutorial on the rules and patterns of dactylic hexameter, they plunge in with arma virumque cano. They learn scansion not only for the sake of tradition and proper understanding of the poem, but also so that they can appreciate its rhythms and artistry—the same reasons English teachers have for teaching their students iambic pentameter for Shakespeare. The symphony of “longs and shorts” can seem forbidding to students at first, and the remedy for this is most often simply practice. Today, given the convenience of phone and tablet apps, and their potential to transform idle moments of otium into more productive ones, the Pericles Group, LLC has created the Latin Scansion App to help Latin AP students practice scanning Vergil.