There are plenty of online resources for those reading the classics nowadays. This is the first of a series of post about the ones I find useful
Number one has to be Perseus. This advantages when reading Greek are immense. The most useful thing about Perseus is the ability to click on any word and it comes back with the dictionary definition of that word and it parses that word. This is incredibly useful if you are reading Homer and he uses some obscure aorist which would take ages to work out if all you had was Lidell and Scott. Besides this for most books you can get a translation and for some a commentary. I would think that nearly every student of Ancient Greek or Latin now uses Perseus.
There are some problems with Perseus. These are
The display is rather too busy. It would be better if you could hide parts of the page that you don’t need when reading – for example the table of contents – and free up space for the text.
For some texts the commentary or translation often disappear when you move to a new page or section. This must be a bug in their code somewhere.
It does not correctly parse some obscure forms of words. For example for ἤρικε(iliad 17.295) it doesn’t give the correct reference.
It does contain some typos especially in the more obscure texts.
It relies on out of copyright material. Actually this doesn’t worry me at all. Older translations may be less readable but they tend to show the nuances of the Greek more which is better if you are reading the Greek and just using the translations to confirm your own translations. And as for the texts and commentaries, there may have be new thinking but for me the old ones are just as good. It strikes me that academics today may produce new commentaries and apply new scholarship to textual readings, but they might as well be throwing them into the wind as the publishers price these works so high that no student is going to use them when they can go to Perseus for free.
There is no Ipad version of Perseus – as I tend to use my IPad more than my computer an IPad application would be useful. They have gone part of the way by making it possible for others to write such applications but no one has taken up the challenge. On the other hand the Web version is good enough and there would be no point in expending a lot of work on something that may be only marginally better.
There is no easy way to pass feedback to Perseus about error or problems you may have with their site or pass suggestions for improvement.q
platosparks 