The Classics Reader

A project for overcoming problems with special fonts in bringing ancient texts on the web.

Please note: this page has been superseded by this one.

Click here to position the text at the top of this page.

Please note: The above is the unregistered version, in which features such as “find word” are not functional. To obtain a version with this function working, as well as to see what else might be included, see the registered version.

The Classics Reader is a project implemented by the author of this page that aims at presenting original ancient Greek texts along with their translations in various languages.

Ancient Greek text includes diacritic marks over vowels that are not included in standard character sets.⁽¹⁾ This makes it difficult to present such texts in their original form.⁽²⁾ Some attempts have been made to overcome this problem by overlaying the diacritic marks over the letters, most notably by the Perseus project of Tufts University, but the results are not exactly visually pleasing because computer fonts were not designed with the overlayed characters idea in mind. Classics Reader attempts to overcome these problems by displaying GIFs for each character, together with their diacritics, if any. It does this by running a Java applet when you open this page. If your browser can run Java applets, most probably you are now seeing the ancient text placed side-by-side with one of its translations at the top of this page. In addition, Classics Reader requires no special setting of your browser to see the ancient text, as opposed to the aforementioned project.

Current Status

• Homer’s Odyssey has been included in the texts displayed by Classics Reader, with Samuel Butler’s publicly available English translation in prose, and the wonderful Modern Greek translation in verse, by Argyris Eftaliotis (unfortunately Eftaliotis managed to complete only 21 out of the 24 books before his death; you may change the translation by clicking on the pull-down list-box, on the upper-right of the text). My future plans include Homer’s Iliad.
• Herodotus’s Histories: a small amount only of the translation (by the author) in English and Modern Greek has been included. This is one of my (many) pet projects, and keeps being enriched all the time.
• Euclid’s Elements, Book I, only up to the Common Notions (or Axioms), translated into English and Modern Greek by the author.

Known Issues

Why is the text printed in this funny fashion, with letters appearing to “push” each other, until they all fall in place?

Because each letter is an image (a GIF). Web browsers (as well as the Java engine that’s responsible for displaying those GIFs on your screen) show images in a random order when they have to show more than one of them on the same page. Thus, character images appear on a first-loaded-first-displayed basis, until they are all in place. However, once an image is loaded it doesn’t need to be reloaded when re-printed, unless you jump out of this page; that’s why this funny behavior diminishes as you scroll down the text. However, in the registered version this problem becomes practically a non-issue, because the registered version runs locally on your computer, so its speed is such that you won’t be able to notice the letters “pushing” each other.

Why is this weird font used for classical texts? Why does the circumflex look strange? Why don’t the letters look more like the usual ancient Greek letters of classical literature or the Bible?

The font employed by Classics Reader is the standard Times Roman font used in Greek literature in Greece, to print both modern and classical texts. The circumflex is correct according to that tradition. The reader who wonders about this issue is probably more familiar with fonts used in western Europe and the USA to print classical and biblical Greek texts. There is no reason why the latter tradition should be preferred over the former. Note that west European and American fonts for ancient Greek texts cannot be “closer to the original”, because ancient texts were hand-written by scribes, so their appearance depended on the scribe’s handwriting; it was only relatively recently that typography standardized what is now recognized as “ancient Greek font” in the West.

Sometimes, when using the scrollbars of the browser (not the Classics Reader’s own ones), some line or lines appear misprinted in the Reader’s text.

This is a problem created by the browser, and it appears occasionally when scrolling up or down, while a Java applet attempts to paint the area of its applet. To refresh the text, click on the Chapter selection (the middle of the three choice-boxes) and select the same chapter that you are currently reading.

Footnotes (clicking on the footnote number brings back to the text)

(1) Unicode, in its definition, includes the ancient Greek letters with diacritics. The problem is that most common fonts do not include the ancient Greek Unicode pages, and if a special and suitable font is used by this page, it is not guaranteed that the reader’s computer will have that font already installed (nor is it a good idea to ask the reader to install a new font just for the purposes of viewing this page).

(2) Actually the original written form of Homer’s epics and other classical Greek texts included only capital letters, when these epics passed from the oral to the written tradition. Lowercase letters with their diacritics were introduced by Greek grammarians during the Hellenistic times (after the death of Alexander the Great). It has been the tradition, since then, to print the “original” ancient texts in lowercase letters and with diacritics.

For comments, suggestions, or other correspondence please contact the author of this page. Click here to email to him.

Back to the Classical Texts of Literature