New Version - Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War (English)

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

New Modules Iliad and Odyssey Commentaries

The best just got better. In addition to being the only place to get a morphological text of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, now you can use some of the old school commentaries to help you read along in the Homeric texts.

First is a 3-for-1 commentary set which includes the following commentaries

1. Allen Rogers Benner [1903], Selections from Homer's Iliad, with an introduction, notes, a short Homeric grammar, and a vocabulary.
2. Walter Leaf [1900], The Iliad, edited, with apparatus criticus, prolegomena, notes, and appendices.
3. Thomas D. Seymour [1891], Homer's Iliad, Books I-III and Homer's Iliad, Books IV-V.

The second commentary set is for the Odyssey and it includes only one commentary, but it is, nevertheless, a good one:

• W. Walter Merry; James Riddell; D. B. Monro [1886], Homer's Odyssey.

Both commentaries function quite similarly and, while being usefully run in BibleWorks, they run as stand-alone HTML help files as well. In order to use the files profitably in BibleWorks, unzip the contents of both to the C:\Program Files\BibleWorks 7\databases folder. The next time you run BibleWorks they will show up under the Resources menu under a category called "Classics Resources."

Happy Reading!!

DOWNLOAD Iliad Commentaries!

DOWNLOAD Odyssey Commentary!

Update: Dead link fixed.

Oxford Sale via Amazon

This one deserves another shout-out. Mark yourself down for two copies of each for Christmas!

The best sale I have ever seen is now on at Amazon for either the Oxford Latin Dictionary $111, or the Great Scott edition of the LSJM Greek lexicon $88!!!

http://www.amazon.com/b/?ie=UTF8&node=13390931


If you haven't bought real editions of either of these yet, I'm not sure you'll ever find better prices for new copies.

User-database: Gorgias' Enconium of Helen Greek and English

It's been a busy summer and it may get busier once school begins. Jim has done a wonderful job of filling in for me while I've been busy this summer getting married, honeymooning, relocating, etc. I am about to start a new PhD program and I've been very busy preparing myself for all the demands that will make on my life, but I just finished a major translation project I had been working on so I figured it was a good time to pause and give something back to the BibleWorks community. (notice how many times I used "busy"??)

The latest release is a short, but good one. It is Gorgias' Enconium of Helen. Of course Gorgias is one of those famous names in classical history. He flourishes during the time of Socrates and is one of the sophists (teachers of rhetoric) who were rather looked down upon by Socrates but whom many associated with Socrates much to Socrates' detriment. One of the main things sophists were known for was their ability to make the lesser argument the greater, i.e. to be able to argue both sides of any issue. In our age, this sort of thing is connected with postmodern relativism and how everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but that there is no absolute right or wrong, black or white. While postmodernism is not the same as the line of thinking from Gorgias' time it is interesting to see how some things never change (how very un-postmodern?)

DOWNLOAD Gorgias in Greek and in English.
Instructions for installation in the readme files part of the .zip.

Smyth, Greek Grammar

In what is the first of a few updates, I am happy to release the first edition of Smyth's Greek Grammar. This is a pretty monumental release because of the size and quality of the work. For a long time, this work has only been available digitally as a PDF on Textkit's website or on Perseus, but the dependability of Perseus has been more questionable as of late, which makes that version less useful. I saw long ago that George Somsel began a project to digitalize Smyth on CCEL, but it seems like that has long since stopped. I have grabbed his first couple of pages since I did not have these in my HTML version. I also included at the end an index for Smyth to various works which are found within the text. This is a valuable list, but I have not yet got around to making the links work for it. Kudos to the Greek Geek for those references.

So what works and what doesn't in this release?
You can use this to let me know yourself what is or isn't working, but here are some of the things I know of:

• Most of the links should work that do not contain letters in them. So a link that says "cross 832" should work, but link "823 a" probably doesn't. The fix is fairly simple, i just need to add a "_" to the links (and finish adding anchors where they do not exist)

• Page numbers have anchors and they are the primary means for getting around on the left-hand pane. (But I only have the table of contents for Part One and Part Three up)

• Part Two on Inflection and especially Part Four on Syntax will be slow to load because they are very large HTML files. In the future I will try to chop up these files into smaller bites so they load faster.

• I have not read the entire text so I don't know if there are any major typos or text issues. There are bound to be some since the file is large.

If you notice anything else you can let me know. As of right now though the problem isn't that I haven't found the mistakes, it's that I haven't had the time to fix them. So if you want to help out cleaning up any of the files, please let me know! Meanwhile, enjoy what does work about these files.

DOWNLOAD!

Update: Goodwin's Grammar

New to Goodwin's Greek Grammar is added functionality to make it more useful as a reference text.

Now when you have it loaded in BibleWorks it will offer links in the Resource Summary Window based on over 20 syntactical categories like the cases, moods, pronouns which will instantly jump you to the relevant portions of Goodwin's Grammar.

Take a look for instance at John 16:1. When I mouse over the word ὑμῖν, Goodwin now provides instant links to the following syntactic categories which pertain to this word: Pronouns, Personal Pronouns, and Dative Case.



Then clicking on one of these will automatically load the Goodwin Grammar to the appropriate spot. Neat huh?

To get this feature you could redownload the entire Goodwin grammar, but that isn't especially recommended since it's over 20MB. Instead, just download this short goodwingr.chd, save it in your subdirectory of BibleWorks called "databases" (overwriting the old file), restart BibleWorks and you will have the new special features.

DOWNLOAD entire Grammar!

DOWNLOAD goodwingr.chd!

Vocab Module: LXX Vocabulary

BibleWorks user Jackson Atkins submitted a vocabulary file for the BibleWorks Vocabulary Module which contains words used in the LXX 100+ times but that do not occur in the New Testament 10+ times (a pool which includes 89 words). The frequency numbers and definitions were made from the LEH Septuagint lexicon and proper names were omitted.

Jackson writes: I hope this vocab file will help people to explore and use the LXX more in their studies and ministries. I am currently working on an extended vocab file that includes all the words that are in the LXX 100+ times but not in the NT 25+ times (241 words). However, I have no idea when I will complete this file.

DOWNLOAD!
Copy file to \init\ subdirectory of BibleWorks7
Load the Vocabulary Module in BibleWorks
File: Import: and open lxxvocab100.vrt

New Module - Goodwin, A Greek Grammar

The latest offering is one that has long been available on TextKit and CCEL. I had always been hoping to find a text/HTML version of it online somewhere, but I haven't yet. Nevertheless, the page images are still valuable and so now we are pleased to release Goodwin's Greek Grammar for use in BibleWorks 7! Sure it's not as good as the real thing, but the price is right isn't it??

This is what the blurb in TextKit had to say:

Goodwin's Greek Grammar stands with Hadley's Greek Grammar as one of the most widely used and longest running Greek Grammars in America. The grammar has gone through many editions and reprints for over 130 years, with the last major edition appearing in 1930.

Goodwin first earned academic recognition for his Syntax of the Moods and Tenses of the Greek Verb which was first published in 1865. Five years later in 1870 he created the first edition of Greek Grammar which was a brief 235 page textbook called Elementary Greek Grammar. In 1879 the grammar was later revised to 393 page edition and renamed to A Greek Grammar. In 1892, Goodwin revised his grammar yet again to the 451 page edition entitled, A Greek Grammar Revised and Enlarged. It is the 'revised and enlarged' edition which was in widespread use and it is this edition that is available for download. The next major edition, the Goodwin and Gulick edition, occurred 38 years later in 1930 and was largely rewritten by Charles Gulick. The Goodwin and Gulick edition can be purchased new to this day.It should be made absolutely clear that Goodwin's Greek Grammar is what is known as a reference grammar and it is not intended for beginners. Historically, students used this grammar in conjunction with a reader by the same publisher. The reader would provide notes and references back to the grammar for further help and clarification. See Goodwin's First Four Book's of Xenophon's Anabasis as an example.

Goodwin's Greek Grammar use as a reference grammar for the modern student is now largely replaced by Smyth's massive and highly praised 800 page Greek Grammar which was first published in 1920. Still, for intermediates Goodwin offers more succinct discussions and for all learners an additional perspective is at times very helpful. Part IV, Syntax, should prove to be especially helpful for today's learners and is well worth exploration.

DOWNLOAD! 23 MB!

Real Books for Sale!

Speaking of not having access to the materials you need....

Oxford UP is having its twice a year (I believe) sale where you can get a great deal on real books. You will not find better prices for new books than what they offer here. (and if you can find better prices, someone needs to tell me!!)

The big Liddell-Scott-Jones is on sale for $80 (sic)

and the equally large Oxford Latin Dictionary is also on sale for $135.

In other words, those are both really great deals. Buy now, pay later.*


* Although I am not advising abusing your credit cards or buying a lexicon for yourself while letting your significant other go without some other necessity like an iPod just because you had to have an expensive lexicon. That's just silly.

User-database: Homer-Hesiod completed!!

Someone must have been really good this year because Christmas is striking early and often. My new hero in life, John Jackson, just completed his ginormous endeavor to tag and lemmatize the entire Homeric/Hesiodic corpus and because he is such a gracious individual he allows me to import this material into BibleWorks. Who's the real winner? We all are! By all means, drop John a note to tell him how awesome he is!

So without further ado. Update your files, because John Jackson has finished and this latest database (HHJ and HJM) includes the Shield of Heracles and all of the Homeric Hymns, lemmatized, tagged and everything. Wow.

The Hesiodic material is based on the Evelyn-White edition, which can be found online via Google.

DOWNLOAD the TEXT
DOWNLOAD the MORPHOLOGY COMPANION

User-database: Callimachus (Greek)

A quick treat before Christmas. Now the addition of Callimachus' Hymns and Epigrams in Greek to BW7! This edition is based on Hymns and Epigrams. Callimachus. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. Berlin. Weidmann. 1897.

(More on Callimachus can be gathered here)

DOWNLOAD!

Update: I posted the wrong text file (it had numbers in the text), so if you downloaded that copy, you can redownload and compile again.

User Database: Demosthenes Speeches in Greek

Thought I'd post something completely different in the Greek world today. Not epic, not poetry, not even myth. Today's new addition to the user-database land is Demosthenes' Speeches. Unfortunately not all of the works of Demosthenes are in public domain, so this edition only contains Speeches 1-40, but that is a good chunk of Demosthenes' work and includes some classic words.

Enjoy!

User Database: Apollonius Rhodius

Another entry in the Epic Greek text category: Apollonius Rhodius' Greek text of his Argonautica is available!

This is a wonderful piece in Greek, but rather difficult translating work. I may have time to put together an English translation help in the future, but for now a lexicon is your best hope!

User Database: Herodotus in English

Earlier this year I compiled Herodotus' Histories in Greek for BibleWorks. Now this invaluable resource is even more invaluable with an English translation to help you out just in case you're still working on the Greek.

The translation is that of A.D. Godley from 1920. It is in the public domain.

This database includes all 9 Books of Herodotus' great work on the History of the Persian Wars. Anyone interested in learning more about Herodotus or this particular work should definitely check out the website Herodotus on the Web. This project was largely completed thanks to the effort of other users of BibleWorks, but Michael Hanel still gets the glory for encouraging the work and making it happen. (that's sarcasm ;) ) BibleWorks staff is not responsible for the content or the use of this database. So if you have any problems with the database, contact me, not BibleWorks support. While the text has not been proofed completely, it appeared to be a fairly clean text. If you find any glaring problems please email me (address available in the readme.txt file) and I will try to get out a better edition.

Vocab Module: Homer's Iliad and Odyssey

The latest files are up which now include a vocabulary module that hits every word in the Iliad and Odyssey!

You can use this vocab module to provide Word Tips in BW which means easy reading in Greek. Obviously the glosses provided here (which are almost entirely based on the endless work of John Jackson) are no substitution for Liddell-Scott entries, but they sure make for smooth reading if you're already comfortable with the Greek language. And if you're not, you can use this module to start learning Vocabulary by frequency, book, or one work (i.e. The Iliad) of Homer vs. the other!