From my diary

I’ve spent today working on some PHP scripts to work with the new Mithras pages.  It’s slow work, programming, especially when you’ve spent the week at the terminal.  Thankfully tomorrow is Sunday, and I never use my PC on Sundays.  I suspect that a farm near me will be selling home-grown strawberries, and I shall go and see!

I don’t refer all that often to Alin Suciu’s amazing blog on Coptic literature.  Yet another find, this time of portions of the Catechitical Orations of Cyril of Jerusalem, is signalled today.  Alin’s work is a model of how to do an academic blog, with footnotes, downloads of relevant old papers, and everything calculated to stir the interest of the most casual viewer. 

UPDATE: Via AWOL I have learned of the new Loebolus site:

Loebolus is based on Edwin Donnelly’s “Downloebables” , aiming to make all the public domain Loebs more easily downloadable by re-hosting the PDF’s directly, without the need to enter CAPTCHA’s.

You can also download a .zip containing all 245 PDF’s (3.2GB). Or view the code used for generating this site on GitHub.

Marvellous!

I’ve also ordered a paperback copy of an English translation of Quintus Curtius.  There isn’t one online, primarily because Bill Thayer has decided not to upload one.

I have no intention of putting online any translations of Curtius. Precisely because he is such an easy author, he is used as homework material around the world: and I will not undercut the work of thousands of Latin teachers by making it easy to cheat.

Bill is right.  We can all agree not to upload a translation of this author, in the interests of a greater elementary knowledge of Latin in the population in general.

That said, since I found myself with tired eyes trying to translate some of it last week, I will provide myself with a ‘crib’!

It’s quite a testimony to the role that Bill has played in putting classical literature online, tho, that, if he doesn’t do it, it doesn’t get done.

I’ve also stumbled across more excellent work by the PLGO people, in adding more versions of GCS volumes, Fathers of the Church, etc, to the web.  Get them conveniently via this interface.  I learn from their forum that some of the CSCO volumes are appearing at Archive.org, it seems.  No time to get these this evening; time only to run a backup and go to bed.

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