Classics Research Links
Staying Current
Tumblr of Recent Finds in Ancient Mediterranean Archaeology
Writing and Speaking
Writing: Professor Romero’s notes on Quotation and Citation of Greek and Roman Sources In Text and Inset
Presenting: Use PowerPoint, but maybe make a beautiful timeline, too!
Bibliographical Search Tools
Professor Romero’s notes on Preparing a bibliography for a Classics research paper
Jack Bales’ UMW Guide for Classics research at Simpson Library
L’Année Philologique, the basic search guide for bibliography in Classics. Often with summaries in English, though often not.
TOCS-IN: best resource for searching for recent (last several years) bibliography, more current than l’année phil. No summaries, of course.
And get to know Carla Bailey, our interlibrary loan librarian. She will be your very best friend, and she is the absolute best at her job. Then put in ILL requests.
Text Searches, Concordances, Maps, Basic Information
Coins: CoinArchives.com. The Pro version is what’s really needed, but get a start here looking for great coins with beautiful images. Put in the name of a politician, city, god, year, or place, and see what comes up. Also, the Ernst Badian Collection of Roman Republican Coinage at Rutgers is virtually complete. For those wishing to study the propaganda value of Roman coinage, check out a typed lecture by Badian here.
Greek: Chicago Homer, search for words in texts from Homer to Homeric hymns; UMW has an institutional subscription to TLG, the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, a database of the whole of ancient Greek literature; that subscription also gives you access to LSJ, the authoritative Greek-English dictionary. Greek vocabulary: see Dickinson College’s list of 524 most common words in Greek.
Latin: PHI Packard Humanities Institute, search for words in the whole of Latin literature; similarly from Perseus. Latin vocabulary: Dickinson College’s list of 997 most common words in Latin.
Atlas of the Ancient World: Pleiades Barrington Atlas is the starting point of all serious map-making of the ancient world, but also see the new Historical Atlas of the Ancient World, a New Pauly supplement [Simpson library]. A very old but useful and searchable reference available for free online is Hazlitt’s Classical Gazetteer.
Athens: Camp’s Archaeology of Athens is fundamental. This Oxford bibliography prepared by Jeff Hurwit is a solid starting point.
Rome: start with Claridge’s Oxford Archaeological Guide and supplement with Richardson’s New Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome. Bernie Frischer’s videos of a 3D reconstruction of Rome are mesmerizing (one is below), and his links are very helpful, too. A great work for this topic is Giuseppe Lugli’s comprehensive collection of all ancient, non-archaeological sources for our knowledge of ancient Rome: Fontes ad Topographiam Veteris Urbis Romae Pertinentes; an intelligent and student-friendly version thereof is Peter Aichen’s excellent collection of translated literary sources for the study of the ancient city.
Encyclopedias: start with OCD 4th ed., use Pauly-Wissowa (bring your German!) and the Neue Pauly (no German required!). But don’t forget the ancient Smith’s Biographical Dictionary (links are at the bottom of the page)–some of it will be outdated, but you will at least know what the minimal textual information is on any given god, hero, person, place, or thing. A well-illustrated French encyclopedia of daily life is equally fascinating, Daremberg-Saglio.
Ancient Authors: New Pauly supplement for Greek and Roman authors
Myth: Try New Pauly supplement for myth as well as the essential work on iconography of ancient myth, the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae.