Perseus: CD-ROM with ancient Greek literature, history, and art.
Vassilis Alexandris
November 14, 1995
IT'S ALL GREEK ON THIS DISC
GREG KANE, Knight-Ridder News Service
The throbbing cacophony of American media culture often seems to
have amnesia about anything that happened before yesterday. In fact, the
world is old, and much of Western culture dates back 2,600 years to
Greek towns scattered on a rugged isthmus jutting south into the
Mediterranean.
To understand our civilization, you have to know about the ancient
Greeks'.
Our language is filled with their words, our churches with their
philosophy, our science with their mathematics, our governments with
their ideals; the structure of our world rests on the foundation of
theirs. All philosophy, asserted a famous historian, is but a footnote
to Socrates.
Now the Harvard Perseus Project has released Perseus (version 1.0,
$ 125, Yale University Press, 800 987-7323), a Macintosh-based CD-ROM
crammed with ancient Greek literature, history, and art. Perseus is as
exciting for laymen as it is for experts.
The Perseus Project, named after a mythical hero who explored the
limits of the known world, is an ongoing effort whose first mandate is
to collect in one computer database a massive archive of texts, maps,
photographs, and essays that will let scholars integrate electronic
tools into their work. The project's second mandate is to make the
subject accessible to laymen.
Non-professionals will be interested in Perseus reference library:
A carefully researched and readable overview, an encyclopedia, an atlas,
and 5,000 color photos that illuminate the history, philosophy, art,
architecture, and archaeology of Greece's golden age. The disc also
includes translations, from the renowned Loeb Classical Library, of
dozens of works of Greek literature.
Scholars will use Perseus primary classical texts, included in the
original Greek and accompanied by annotated English translations.
Philological tools analyze how ancient authors used particular words and
phrases, and let researchers track linguistic change over time.
Historians will turn to the detailed photographic record of ancient
coins and pottery.
Perseus shortcomings are more a matter of form than function.
Because the program's current version is really a Hypercard stack, it
uses only a tiny fraction of a Mac screen, and displays information
about as fast as you could write it longhand. Future versions may scrap
this dependence on Apple's dinosaur Hypercard.
Be warned that Perseus is a work in progress, so Version 1 has empty
spots. The encyclopedia is skeletal, the atlas primitive. Version 2 is
due out next spring, Version 3 in 1997. By then, Perseus will include
20,000 photographs and 3 million words of primary text, more than
two-thirds of all surviving Greek writing.
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