Life of Demonax (Lucian of Samosata, Second Century CE)
στάσεως δέ ποτε Ἀθήνησι γενομένης εἰσῆλθεν εἰς τὴν ἐκκλησίαν καὶ φανεὶς μόνον σιωπᾶν ἐποίησεν αὐτούς· ὁ δὲ ἰδὼν ἤδη μετεγνωκότας οὐδὲν εἰπὼν καὶ αὐτὸς ἀπηλλάγη.
Once when the Athenians had collapsed into political discord, he went to the assembly and just by appearing, brought them to silence. When he saw they had relented, he excused himself without a word.
(Lucian, Life of Demonax)
On this site
- Scholia 2026 Reader - experimental design of a dynamic reading interface for intermediate-level students of Ancient Greek. The technology stack is based on TEI XML to support structured authoring and editing of text, translation and glosses. The approach works with any languages supported by Unicode.
- A PDF version of the developer's English translation (only) is laid out for the page.
The translation and notes are by the developer, and any errors are mine. I also contributed the sectioning and section titles. Especially if you have corrections or suggestions for improvement, please provide feedback in the site repository.
The source text is derived from Perseus.org by way of the Scaife Reader XML download feature, which delivers TEI XML. Any corrections or improvements to these texts, along with enhancements (in the form of glosses or translation) are hereby offered back.
On the web
- The Scaife Reader interface to the Perseus text of Demonax may represent the state of the art in interactive readers.
- An amazing resource for the student: The Lucian of Samosata Project.
Homer Scriptorium exercises - ILIAD
Squibs (extracta scribenda)
Cribs (running vocabularies, segmented)
A rendering of the Iliad Venetus A Manuscript, broken into line groups
(squibs
) corresponding to paragraphs in the 1924 translation by A. T. Murray.
1137 pages are available covering all 24 books (15639 lines) of the epic.
In parallel with the squibs, each segment also has a page given to a running vocabulary,
a crib
.
With navigation for these Iliad study aids, links are offered to online resources for further study.
All source texts were acquired from the Internet as noted in their footers. Grateful acknowledgement to the Homer Multitext Project for the transcribed Venetus A (with fabulous TEI encoding); theoi.com for the Murray translation; and to Github user GCelano (Giuseppe Celano) for work integrating morphological data into an encoded Iliad.
Glitches and alignment errors can be corrected: please feel free to report.
Online Iliad
- Logeion at UChicago - awesome resource
- Scaife Greek Vocabulary tool set to the Iliad
- Book I 1-25 in the beyond-translation reader
- The Chicago Homer (Kahane, Mueller, Berry, Parod)
How to use the squibs
The squibs are designed for an exercise in language and literature study described below, the Scholia Method. Print one page or many. At fifteen lines a day the entire Iliad can be copied in less than three years.
Preview your print job, resetting page size, orientation and scaling options for best
results. A landscape setting can work well. A scratch pad
image in the footer helps
to prevent crowding on a single page; an unwanted final page can be omitted from
printing.
When you want to print more than one or two passages, a single page view of each book may be more convenient.
How to use the cribs (running vocabularies)
The cribs offer vocabulary help in the form of quick lookup of terms found in each of the squibs. Vocabulary terms are listed with links for lookup into the excellent University of Chicago resources Morpho (for morphological analysis) and Logeion (when a dictionary form is given). The short definitions have been extracted from the Scaife Viewer word list for the entire Iliad.
Use this listing for either cursory (review/reminder/confirmation) or deep lookup of terms. With each term the grammatical form is described (thanks to gcelano lemmatized datasets) - it won't tell you what it means to be an aorist but it will tell you it's an aorist. Nouns and verbs get special outlines; other parts of speech are marked. Not all terms or parts of speech are given: for example you are on your own with particles.
These pages are also designed to be printed, for annotation by hand or even for clipping. When you print with a web browser, only the opened (expanded) terms are printed, as the print preview will show. By this means you can limit the print to just the words you want to study.
Scriptorium Method
The Scriptorium Method is an approach to language study developed by Alexander Arguelles and popularized on line. It is especially well suited to studying ancient languages, poetry and literary works in any language.
These pages seek to support, arguably unnecessarily, the method with technology. Printed
and electronic aids can reduce the need to turn pages or enter terms into search boxes,
while offering space for whatever notes or glosses are
helpful for understanding, retention, and later reference. Squibs and cribs are meant to
facilitate this assimilation: before the final
transcription (which is only, after all, the
latest transcription), the text requires completion, like a
coloring book, except using letters, words and language, not shapes and colors. (Or
shapes and colors too.)
Scholia 2026 is an initiative supporting this and related work in language study such as the preparation of assisted readers or desktop-printed micro-editions.
Also by the developer
- The XProc Zone, a set of XProc demonstration and documentation projects
- Pellucid Literature - more experiments using different production methods (all XML-based)
- XML Jelly Sandwich demonstrations - XSLT in the browser using SaxonJS - includes among others:
- An I Ching engine
- EVE, the Electronic Verse Engineer
- Print your own Ancient Greek Vocabulary flashcards
- My business home page (due for refurb)