Research Guides: Global Language Literatures: Greek and Latin

Classical Literature Reference Material

Handbook for Classical Research

One of the glories of the Greco-Roman classics is the opportunity that they give us to consider a great culture in its entirety; but our ability to do that depends on our ability to work comfortably with very varied fields of scholarship. The Handbook for Classical Research offers guidance to students needing to learn more about the different fields and subfields of classical research, and its methods and resources.

Classical Literature and Its Times

World Literature and Its Times helps students and researchers make connections between political/social climate during which books were written and the works themselves.

The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature

Extensively revised and updated since the second edition was published in 1989, the Companion acknowledges changes in the focus of scholarship over the last twenty years, through the incorporation of a far larger number of thematic entries such as medicine, friendship, science, freedom (concept of), and sexuality. These topical entries provide an excellent starting point to the exploration of their subjects in classical literature; after all, for many aspects of classical society the literature we have inherited is the primary (and sometimes the only) source material. Additions and changes have been made taking into account the advice of teachers and lecturers in Classics, ensuring that current educational needs are catered for.

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages is the first comprehensive reference work treating all of the languages of antiquity. Clear and systematic in its approach, the Encyclopedia combines full linguistic coverage of all the well-documented ancient languages, representing numerous language families from around the globe.

Handbook for Classical Research

The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages

Handbook for Classical Research

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The History

Here is the historian, investigating and judging what he has seen, heard, and read, and seeking out the true causes and consequences of the great deeds of the past. In his History, the war between the Greeks and Persians, the origins of their enmity, and all the more general features of the civilizations of the world of his day are seen as a unity and expressed as the vision of one man who as a child lived through the last of the great acts in this universal drama.

The Iliad

Dating to the ninth century B.C., Homer’s timeless poem still vividly conveys the horror and heroism of men and gods wrestling with towering emotions and battling amidst devastation and destruction, as it moves inexorably to the wrenching, tragic conclusion of the Trojan War. Renowned classicist Bernard Knox observes in his superb introduction that although the violence of the Iliad is grim and relentless, it coexists with both images of civilized life and a poignant yearning for peace.

The Odyssey

If the Iliad is the world's greatest war epic, the Odyssey is literature's grandest evocation of an everyman's journey through life. Odysseus' reliance on his wit and wiliness for survival in his encounters with divine and natural forces during his ten-year voyage home to Ithaca after the Trojan War is at once a timeless human story and an individual test of moral endurance. In the myths and legends retold here.

Ovid Metamorphoses

Ovid’s sensuous and witty poem brings together a dazzling array of mythological tales, ingeniously linked by the idea of transformation—often as a result of love or lust—where men and women find themselves magically changed into new and sometimes extraordinary beings. Beginning with the creation of the world and ending with the deification of Augustus, Ovid interweaves many of the best-known myths and legends of ancient Greece and Rome, including Daedalus and Icarus, Pyramus and Thisbe, Pygmalion, Perseus and Andromeda, and the fall of Troy. Erudite but light-hearted, dramatic and yet playful, Metamorphoses has influenced writers and artists throughout the centuries from Shakespeare and Titian to Picasso and Ted Hughes.

Internet Resources

The Chicago Homer
The Chicago Homer is a multilingual database that uses the search and display capabilities of electronic texts to make the distinctive features of Early Greek epic accessible to readers with and without Greek.
Corpus Scriptorum Latinorum
The Corpus Scriptorum Latinorum (CSL) is a collaborative project among scholars from a variety of disciplines with the main purpose of creating a digital library of Latin literature, spanning from the earliest epigraphic remains to the Neo-Latinists of the eighteenth century.
Epigraphic Database Heidleberg
The Epigraphic Database Heidelberg contains the texts of Latin and bilingual (i.e. Latin-Greek) inscriptions of the Roman Empire. The epigraphic monuments are collected and kept up to date on the basis of modern research. With the help of search functions specific queries can be carried out - e.g. a search for words in inscriptions and / or particular descriptive data. The search results are often displayed together with photos and drawings.
Perseus Project
Our flagship collection, under development since 1987, covers the history, literature and culture of the Greco-Roman world.
Society for the Oral Reading of Greek and Latin
Sound recordings of classics of Greek and Latin literature read by scholars and experts.

Maps of the Ancient World

40 Maps that Explain the Roman Empire
Travel, war, volcanoes, it's all here. Site is a project of Vox Media, and web publishing company.
Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilizations
The Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilization (DARMC) makes freely available on the internet materials for a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) approach to mapping and spatial analysis of the Roman and medieval worlds. Site also includes helpful LINKS to other digital mapping projects of this region and the chronological period.
Maps of the Ancient World
A selection of digital & downloadable maps of the ancient world from the Oxford Classical Dictionary Online.
Polis (Inventory of Archaic & Classical Greek City-States)
This site allows scholars and students of classical Greek (and to some extent Roman) history to visualize data about Places (especially archaic and classical Greek city-states) and People (those famous enough to be included in a standard Classical dictionary) from two large data-sets, and to generate maps and simple statistical information from them. Based on Mogens Herman Hansen' & Thomas Heine Nielsen's Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis (New York: Oxford, 2004; 1396 p.).

Global Language Literatures

Classical Literature Reference Material

Handbook for Classical Research

Classical Literature and Its Times

The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages

A Companion to Greek Art

Encyclopaedia of the Ancient World

Handbook for Classical Research

Classical Literature and Its Times

The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages

A Companion to Greek Art

Encyclopaedia of the Ancient World

Handbook for Classical Research

Select Titles

Vergil's Aeneid

The History

The Iliad

The Odyssey

Ovid Metamorphoses

Vergil's Aeneid

The History

The Iliad

The Odyssey

Ovid Metamorphoses

Vergil's Aeneid

Internet Resources

Maps of the Ancient World