Perseus Updates
09 Oct 2009 posted by: Chris Weimer tags: website links
As a fan of Perseus, I was delighted to find out that just two days ago they added some new texts to their collections: “Seneca, Quintilian, Flaccus, Cicero, Aulus Gellius, Ammianus and Petronius.” While they had some Cicero before, what’s new are his philosophical writings, which for some reason or another had largely been absent on Perseus. De Natura Deorum in particular is welcomed by me, as I’m working through it currently.
Thanks for the note on this. It’s a dark day for Latin when Aulus Gellius is included in this list though. People might actually think he’s good Latin
What are you working on the Cicero for? I currently have a class on Cicero’s De Re Publica, so this seems favorable for me as well, but I am a bit worried about how accurate the scanned text will be.
October 9th, 2009 at 4:57 pmMy class is on De Natura Deorum, Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, and Seneca’s Epistulae Morales. I did take De Re Publica back in undergrad, tho. I’m afraid that the professor used scanned copies of his edition, so I never got one. Just scanning over De Natura Deorum, there are some differences between the 1917 Teubner and Dyck’s Cambridge edition/commentary, which is more up to date.
Is there not an OCT for De Re Publica, because there isn’t for De Natura Deorum…
October 9th, 2009 at 5:10 pmSad, I forgot to enter the spam code and lost my post. Anyway, there is a recent OCT (2006 - Powell) which contains some of the philosophical writings (including De Re P.), but we are using the Zetzel Cambridge commentary which is quite good.
October 9th, 2009 at 5:27 pm[…] Chris Weimer notes that Perseus Digital Library has updated its Latin offerings and now includes more texts from Cicero, as well as texts from Seneca, Quintilian, Flaccus, Aulus Gellius, Ammianus and Petronius. While most of them seem to be “outdated” texts, it still is nice to have them around. The other good news is that since they are older texts, a lot of them are in the public domain. I haven’t looked as much at the English translations (not every Greek or Latin text on Perseus has an English translation available on the website), so I can’t comment a lot on their quality, but some of them look like Loeb translations. The overall implementation of this update is not as glamorous (look for instance at the way it handles Aulus Gellius) as some of the other Perseus versions, but I suppose it is better than nothing. […]
October 10th, 2009 at 1:27 pmFinally, a brighter day starts for Latin. I am a big fun of Perseus, too! And so are my poor students who are burdened with the task to go through its pages.
November 25th, 2009 at 3:44 am