A Resource Bank for Serious Students
Listing a handful of websites I've used to great effect while writing articles for this newsletter
Much has been said about the Antigone Journal’s lack of accountability since their founding; about every six months they seem to elicit some new controversy in order to generate clicks for what they call their “independently-funded” online collection of essays. After the most recent crusade they launched against another fellow scholar, I decided it was no longer appropriate to sit on another piece of criticism that drives home just how poorly managed their website is. In the navigation bar, a button labeled “AIDS” will take people to a section that boasts of 100+ resources for studying the classics. As the old adage goes; it’s not the size of the webpage that matters, but how you use it. A list of resources is in some ways similar to a recipe when it comes to proving point-of-origin: accusations of plagiarism are difficult to definitively prove because lists of their nature often have overlap, especially when the content exists all within the same field. Of course the presence of long-extinct ingredients like silphium, dodo birds, or Roman-emperors.org1 may help to contextualize whether everything’s above board or not. At times, the list includes lazy redundancies, like the “Greek literature,” Latin literature,” “Greek dictionary,” and “Latin dictionary” subsections all having different links back to Tufts’ Perseus Hopper site. Barring all these errors, they still pad out the list with a good chunk of “filler” sites that are related to the classics, but which have no business in a resource document. All due respect to Dr. Donald Kagan, but his YouTube lecture series on Greek civilization isn’t something I plan on coming back to if I need specific information on the Hellenic world.
Rather than list each lackluster entry on their list and break down their shortcomings, I thought it would be more productive to put forward my own collection of links that have helped me in my studies. This is effectively a copy of the bookmarks bar on my browser, minus non-classical sources like the Goethe Institute’s e-library, but it gets me through about 80% of what I do for this blog on a monthly basis online.
The Alpheios Project
Alpheios generally has a worse selection of texts than the Perseus Hopper (as mentioned above), but the response time on the website is tenfold faster. The Hopper sets a certain percentage to the chances of one bit of vocabulary being more likely to be used than others in its search function as well, and this can be a harmful crutch under certain circumstances. Additionally, the nature of the sorting method for their in-built Latin-English usage lexicon ceases to function when the example sentences are found in a text outside their sampled content. Some of the lexical citations linked to Cicero break as well because they’re formatted to a different method of separating paragraphs than the presented text.
Godmy's Searchable Digitized Latin & Greek Lexica
Usually it’s the Smith & Hall English-Latin text that most readily comes to use. I don’t often get the chance to translate Latin-English for this blog when it’s outside of the context of the prior entry. When I do, I usually check my physical copy of Cassell’s. Again, the advantage that this site has over competitors is its shorter loading times. It’s also incredibly simple to switch over from one lexicon to another, or to see what the Wagner thesaurus can scrounge up to help me with those song translations.
The Morgan-Owens Neo-Latin Lexicon
This is the most recent addition to the list by at least a 9-month margin. That one side project I’ve been slowly plodding away at requires a whole lot of specialized vocabulary not present in the previous entry, so this site has been a godsend in finding words in the modern world so I don’t have to coin them myself and look incredibly foolish in hindsight. It still lacks some recognition of countries and major cities, which I supplement with Carolus Egger’s Lexicon Nominum Locorum on archive.org.
The Latin Library
If Alpheios and the Perseus Hopper both fail me, and the text isn’t something I have in my library, then Carey’s Latin Library has inevitably acted as my safety net. An interview with the founder suggests that his own interests lie in the study of Latin rather than the classics as a whole. In this case that proves to be a boon, because major works published after about a.d. 476 are absent from the other archives. The tradeoff is that this site offers no frills: it’s the text of one manuscript without translation or any sort of vocabulary tools for hand-holding.
Loebolus
No offense to Edwin Donnelly, but the EDonnelly website has become less functional since I left college. I understand that his radiology work is more immediately important to his community than maintaining a database of links to an archive hosting all the relevant resources. The problem, however, is that a small portion of the links to the Loebs were removed for wrongful copyright violations when Chuck Wendig blew up the Internet Archive. Most of these have been brought back, but the links haven’t been updated. Additionally, the site has become more difficult to navigate because typing in the link now brings users to Donnelly’s twitter account rather than a centralized homepage. The more useful alternative is Loebolus, which sorts all the same pdfs from the Donnelly site into an updated list. I don’t have much of a use at this point in time for the Latin/Greek reader sections
UCB Classics Ancient Greek Tutorials
I don’t get to use my Greek nearly as often as I’d like to, and they don’t have the Attic dialect in Duolingo as of yet. In order to compensate, I mostly drill myself on Donald J. Mastronarde’s website every once in a while. These exercises also appear on atticgreek.org, but this is the place I’m used to accessing them. Going through vocabulary drills once or twice a month is usually enough to keep me sharp, and I still remember the endings for most of the different conjugations without significant issue. I’ve still yet to come by a good alternative for Latin vocabulary, but it’s not in as much danger of slipping away from me, so I’ll play around with Vice Verba on my phone to drill grammar.
There are a handful of other resources I have in my back pocket as well, but for one reason or another don’t come up as often as those I have listed. There’s an online Latin Macronizer that fills in all the work I’ve neglected on my song translations, but the nature of the project is prose+syllable count rather than proper poetry, and I worry that that would confuse too many readers. When that book of fables eventually comes out I’ll inevitably run that all through at the last second, though. The Dickinson College Commentaries website has a digital grammar book, and sometimes I’ll leave my Henle grammar book somewhere inconvenient, so I’ll consult that site instead. The real solution would be to pick up a second copy, but this setup works fine. Antigone also recommends addall.com to find used/rare/out of print books but they don’t calculate shipping costs in their total price, whereas bookfinder.com does. If you believe I’ve missed any important websites that you use in your pursuit of an education in the classics, please share them in the comments below.
It's not the only one, either. UPenn's Vergil project has been down since mid-April, and the one notable example that I've known to be down for about as long as the Antigone Journal has existed now redirects to a scam/phishing kind of website. Good luck dealing with that minefield!