AboutCredits

Credits, licences & privacy

Where every text, picture and piece of data on the site comes from, under what licence, and what the site keeps about you.

Texts and translations

All Greek texts and English translations come from the collections below and are shown exactly as published. We never edit them. If we find an error, we report it to the collection rather than changing our copy.

Perseus Digital Library (PerseusDL/canonical-greekLit), licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
First Thousand Years of Greek (OpenGreekAndLatin/First1KGreek), licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

CC BY-SA 4.0 means anyone may share and adapt this material, as long as they credit the source and share what they make under the same licence.

What this site adds to the collections' catalogue information: an English title for works the collections name only in Latin or Greek. Some are taken from the collections' own English translations; the rest are this site's translations of the Latin or Greek title, and are labelled as such. The library, the reader and each work's page show the original title under the English one. Likewise an English name for the 66 anonymous works, collections, letters and lives that the collections file under a Latin label as if it were an author (Vitae Homeri is shown as “Lives of Homer”), translated by this site with the Latin beside it. For searching, the library also knows each author's Greek name and the other names they go by, from Wikidata's labels and aliases (CC0). The texts themselves are unchanged.

Privacy

No adverts, no analytics, no trackers and no cookies.
Fonts and code are served from this site, so your browser does not contact Google or any other company just to show a page.
Your settings, your recent searches, reading positions, the books you have opened, bookmarks, notes, highlights, unsent forum drafts and everything else in the Treasury, the vase you paint in the Kerameikos, and the people you have hidden in the Agora, are stored only in this browser, on this computer. “Download my Treasury” saves a copy as a file on your computer; nothing is uploaded.
When you are online and a text is not in your downloaded library, your browser fetches that text's file from GitHub (raw.githubusercontent.com).
When you look up a word or open its Word Study page while online, that word (and nothing else) is sent to Wiktionary (en.wiktionary.org).
When you open the reader's Manuscript panel, your browser fetches that manuscript's photographs from its library's image server: the Homer Multitext project (homermultitext.org) for the Iliad, the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana (via OCLC's contentdm.oclc.org) for Aeschylus, Sophocles and Apollonius, or the Bibliothèque nationale de France (gallica.bnf.fr) for Plato. Only the page asked for is requested. The Places panel uses only this site's own map.
The reader's Listen button reads the English translation with a voice from your own device or browser; this site sends nothing. Most voices work on the device itself, but some browsers' online voices (in Microsoft Edge, those whose names end in “Online (Natural)”) are made on the browser maker's servers, so the passage being read goes to them. The Greek is never read aloud.
Downloading the library fetches the text files from GitHub. Links to Logeion and Perseus take you to those sites only when you click them.
Accounts are kept by Supabase, on servers in the European Union (Ireland). Your browser contacts Supabase on your account page and when you are signed in; the home page, reading, study and the Painted Stoa never do. An account holds your email address (used only to sign you in and to send the confirmation and password-reset letters; never shown to anyone), your password (stored by Supabase in scrambled form, never readable), your display name and what you write about yourself.
The Agora and the Pnyx are closed for now. What was written there is kept, and is no longer shown.
If you choose to keep your Treasury in step between devices, a copy of it is stored in your account, readable only by you.
You can delete your account at any time from your account page: this removes your account, your profile, everything you wrote in the Agora and the Pnyx, your votes and your stored Treasury.

Words and dictionaries

Word analyses (dictionary form and grammar of each word, in context), the structure of each sentence (which word depends on which, and how, in the scheme of the Ancient Greek Dependency Treebank), and the genre, dialect and date of each work: GLAUx, by Alek Keersmaekers, CC BY-SA 4.0 (some source texts and hand annotations carry other licences, listed in GLAUx's metadata). Hand-checked analyses come from the Ancient Greek Dependency Treebanks, PROIEL, the Pedalion, Gorman and Harrington treebanks and others, credited in GLAUx. Keersmaekers, A. (2021), “The GLAUx corpus: methodological issues in designing a long-term, diverse, multi-layered corpus of Ancient Greek”, Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change, 39–50.
The Census's sorting of names into people, places and peoples, and of nouns into ships, weapons, animals and other groups, uses the class (animacy) and the word sense GLAUx gives each noun, and the groups of meanings in Princeton WordNet 3.0. WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved. WordNet is provided “as is”, and Princeton University makes no representations or warranties, express or implied (the WordNet licence).
Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek-English Lexicon (LSJ): Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from The National Endowment for the Humanities. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/lexica/.
Short definitions of the commonest words and their frequency ranks: Dickinson College Commentaries Greek Core Vocabulary, by Christopher Francese and collaborators, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Scansion of verse (long and short syllables, and the metre of each line) for Homer, Hesiod, Apollonius, Nonnus, Pindar, Theognis, the Greek Anthology, three plays of Aeschylus and other poets: hypotactic.com, by David Chamberlain, CC BY 4.0. The vowel lengths the site's own scanner uses for other texts were also learned from these scansions.
Authors' dates, birthplaces and descriptions on the Painted Stoa's Authors and Eras pages and on each author's page: Wikidata (property P3576, the TLG author ID, matches its people to the library's authors), CC0. Built by pipeline/build_authors_meta.py; where Wikidata has no date, the dating of works in GLAUx is used and marked.
Wiktionary entries, fetched live when you look up a word, and each word's origin, related Greek words and English descendants on its Word Study page: English Wiktionary contributors, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Pictures

Every picture on the site is a colour photograph of a real object, never redrawn or tinted, shown only where it teaches something about the page it is on (an article in the Painted Stoa, the finds of the Kerameikos), and credited where it is shown. All ornament (the rules, frames and figures) is drawn by this site's own code.

Every picture comes from a collection that states its licence, and the licence is copied from that record by the script that fetched it (web/scripts/fetch-images.ts), which also makes the smaller copies shown on small screens. Pictures from The Metropolitan Museum of Art are from its Open Access programme (CC0: free for any use). Photographs from Wikimedia Commons keep their photographers' licences.

Every picture and its licence

Red-figure amphora attributed to the Berlin Painter, c. 490 BC. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (56.171.38). Berlin Painter. CC0. Used in Black-figure and red-figure.
Panathenaic prize amphora attributed to the Euphiletos Painter, c. 530 BC. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (14.130.12). Euphiletos Painter. CC0. Used in The Olympic Games.
Silver tetradrachm of Athens, c. 440–404 BC. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2021.40.80). CC0. Used in The silver of Laurion.
Mycenaean stirrup jar painted with an octopus, c. 1200–1100 BC. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (53.11.6). CC0. Used in Homer's similes.
Fragments of a Roman copy of the Great Eleusinian Relief, c. 27 BC–AD 14. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (14.130.9). CC0. Used in The Eleusinian Mysteries.
The Street of the Tombs in the Kerameikos, where the Sacred Way to Eleusis began, 2015-10-29 14:46:07. Kerameikos, Athens. Photograph by Jebulon. Wikimedia Commons, CC0. Used in The Kerameikos.
Pericles, Roman marble copy of a Greek portrait of about 440–430 BC, 2nd century AD. British Museum, London. Photograph by Marie-Lan Nguyen. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.5. Used in Pericles.
Socrates, Roman marble portrait, 1st century AD. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photograph by Eric Gaba. Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. Used in The trial of Socrates.
School scenes on a red-figure drinking cup by Douris, c. 480 BC. Antikensammlung, Berlin (F 2285). Photograph by Marcus Cyron. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0. Used in Going to school in Athens.
Fragment of a stone allotment machine (kleroterion), 22 December 2005 (according to Exif data). Museum of the Ancient Agora, Athens. Photograph by Marsyas. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.5. Used in Chosen by lot: the allotment machine.
Ostraka inscribed with the name of Themistocles, 5th century BC. Museum of the Ancient Agora, Athens. Photograph by Zde. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Used in Ostracism.
The Antikythera mechanism, fragment A, 2nd–1st century BC. National Archaeological Museum, Athens. Photograph by Logg Tandy. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0. Used in The Antikythera mechanism.
Clay tablet inscribed in Linear B, from the palace of Pylos, 13th century BC. National Archaeological Museum, Athens. Photograph by Sharon Mollerus. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0. Used in Linear B.
Diogenes, by Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1860. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. Jean-Léon Gérôme. Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. Used in Diogenes the Cynic.
Roman wall painting identified as Crates and Hipparchia, from the Villa Farnesina, 1st century BC–1st century AD. Museo Nazionale Romano, Palazzo Massimo, Rome. Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. Used in Hipparchia the Cynic.
Pythagoras, Roman marble portrait, 2nd century AD. Capitoline Museums, Rome. Photograph by Cmick25. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Used in Pythagoras and the beans.
The remains of the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia at Sparta, 2019-05-15 09:12:34. Sparta. Photograph by George E. Koronaios. Wikimedia Commons, CC0. Used in Growing up Spartan.
Asclepius, from his sanctuary at Epidaurus; Roman copy of a 4th-century BC original, c. AD 160. National Archaeological Museum, Athens. Photograph by Carole Raddato. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0. Used in Asclepius and the healing sleep.
Painted reconstruction of the Peplos Kore (original c. 530 BC) by Vinzenz Brinkmann and Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann, 25 February 2007. Exhibition "Gods in Color". Photograph by Marsyas. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.5. Used in Greek statues were painted.
King Aegeus consults the Delphic oracle; the goddess Themis sits on the tripod. After a red-figure cup by the Kodros Painter, c. 440–430 BC, drawing published 1846. Antikensammlung, Berlin (F 2538). Drawing from Eduard Gerhard, Das Orakel der Themis (1846). Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. Used in Delphi and the oracle.
Symposium scene from the Tomb of the Diver at Paestum, c. 470 BC. Archaeological Museum, Paestum. Photograph by Carole Raddato. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0. Used in The symposium.
Gold funeral mask from Shaft Grave V at Mycenae, the so-called Mask of Agamemnon, 16th century BC. National Archaeological Museum, Athens (NAMA 624). Photograph by Jebulon. Wikimedia Commons, CC0. Used in Mycenae, rich in gold.
Attic Geometric krater attributed to the Hirschfeld Workshop, painted with a funeral, c. 750–735 BC. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (14.130.14). Hirschfeld Workshop. CC0. Used in Reading the layers.
The North Entrance of the palace at Knossos, as reconstructed for Arthur Evans, with a copy of the charging-bull relief, Bronze Age palace, reconstructed in the 20th century. Knossos, Crete. Photograph by Jebulon. Wikimedia Commons, CC0. Used in Knossos and the labyrinth.
Plaster cast in the Acropolis Museum of part of block IV of the Parthenon's east frieze; the marble original is in the British Museum, Original 5th century BC; modern cast. Acropolis Museum, Athens. Photograph by Deiadameian. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Used in The Parthenon Marbles.
Schliemann's trench at Troy (Hisarlik), cut through the mound in the 1870s, Excavated 1870s. Hisarlik, Çanakkale province, Turkey. Photograph by Dosseman. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Used in Troy at Hisarlik.
Terracotta relief plaque made on Melos, with a scene of Odysseus' homecoming, c. 450 BC. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (25.78.26). CC0. Used in The Melian Dialogue.
Michiel Sweerts, Plague in an Ancient City, c. 1652–54. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Michiel Sweerts. Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. Used in The Plague of Athens.
The ancient theatre of Mytilene, on Lesbos, 2009-10-01. . rutger2. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0. Used in The Mytilene debate.
Mount Taygetus, seen from the ruins of the ancient theatre of Sparta, 2019-05-15 10:03:07. . George E. Koronaios. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Used in The helots and the krypteia.
The Death of Socrates, by Jacques-Louis David, 1787. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (31.45). Jacques Louis David. CC0. Used in Drugs and poisons.
Oil flask with a wedding procession, attributed to the Amasis Painter, c. 550–530 BC. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (56.11.1). Amasis Painter. CC0. Used in Love, sex and marriage.
A lane between two blocks of houses at Olynthos, 2006-11-03. . User:Christaras A. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.5. Used in The household.
Grave stele of a young woman and servant, from Attica, c. 400–390 BC. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (36.11.1). CC0. Used in Slavery.
Water jar (hydria) with women at a fountain house, c. 510–500 BC. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (06.1021.77). Class of Hamburg 1917.477. CC0. Used in Women's lives.

Plates of sculpture

Until October 2026 each page opened with its own plate, a photograph of an ancient work, most of them sculpture. Pages now show photographs only where they teach, but these keep their credits here. Most are from The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Open Access programme (CC0), their titles, dates and places copied from the museum's records by web/scripts/fetch-images.ts; the others are among the pictures above.

Every plate and its licence

Marble statue of a togatus (man wearing a toga), 1st century AD. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (04.15). CC0.
Marble left hand holding a scroll, 1st or 2nd century AD. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (21.88.10). CC0.
Marble head of a young woman, perhaps a muse, 3rd–2nd century BC. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (11.212.4). CC0.
Statue of a seated man, 1st–2nd century AD. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (08.258.44). CC0.
Bronze statuette of Apollo, ca. 500 BC. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (07.286.91). CC0.
Terracotta statuette of a teacher and a pupil, late 4th–early 3rd century BC. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (23.259). CC0.
Small marble statue of an athlete, 3rd or 2nd century BC. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (17.230.3). CC0.
Fragment of a marble relief with a Nike, late 5th century BC. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (18.145.61). CC0.
Marble grave stele of a little girl, ca. 450–440 BC. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (27.45). CC0.
Bronze herm, ca. 490 BC. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1989.281.56). CC0.
Bronze statuette of Hermes, 1st century BC–1st century AD. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1971.11.11). CC0.
Fragmentary marble inscription, 2nd half of 4th century BC. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (26.60.4). CC0.
Bronze diskos thrower, ca. 480–460 BC. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (07.286.87). CC0.
Marble seated harp player, 2800–2700 BC. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (47.100.1). CC0.
Fragmentary marble inscription, ca. 425–424 BC. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (26.60.5). CC0.
Marble relief fragment depicting athletic prizes, 2nd century AD. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (59.11.19). CC0.
Clay tablet inscribed in Linear B, from the palace of Pylos, 13th century BC. National Archaeological Museum, Athens. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.
Marble head of a philosopher, 1st or 2nd century AD. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (26.269). CC0.
Marble head of a Greek general, 1st–2nd century AD. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (24.97.32). CC0.
Red-figure amphora attributed to the Berlin Painter, c. 490 BC. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (56.171.38). CC0.
Bronze statuette of Hermes seated on a rock, 1st–2nd century AD. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (20.202). CC0.
Marble statue of Hermes, 1st or 2nd century AD. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (56.234.15). CC0.
Marble stele (grave marker) of Eukleia, 4th century BC. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (57.151). CC0.
Marble bust of a man, mid-1st century AD. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (12.233). CC0.
Bronze Herakles, last quarter of the 6th century BC. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (28.77). CC0.
Marble statue of Eirene (the personification of peace), ca. AD 14–68. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (06.311). CC0.
Marble statue of a kouros (youth), ca. 590–580 BC. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (32.11.1). CC0.
Marble funerary lekythos, ca. 375–350 BC. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (12.159). CC0.
Marble bust of Herodotos, 2nd century AD. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (91.8). CC0.
Bronze statuette of Neptune, early 1st century AD. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (07.286.93). CC0.
Terracotta statuette of the Diadoumenos (youth tying a fillet around his head), 1st century BC. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (32.11.2). CC0.
Marble grave relief with a funerary banquet and departing warriors, 2nd century BC. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1992.11.58). CC0.
Marble portrait head of the philosopher Chrysippos, 1st century AD. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (24.243). CC0.
Bronze statuette of a boy in the pose of an orator, 3rd–2nd century BC. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (21.88.173). CC0.
Marble head of Demosthenes, 2nd century AD. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2012.479.9). CC0.
Marble stele (grave marker) of a woman, ca. 375–350 BC. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (65.11.11). CC0.
Marble portrait head of an elderly man, 1st century BC. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (13.229.4). CC0.
Marble head of Apollo with fragment of his hand, 1st or 2nd century AD. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1980.303.2). CC0.
Marble grave stele with a family group, ca. 360 BC. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (11.100.2). CC0.
Limestone plaque with bilingual inscription, 1st century AD. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (74.51.2393). CC0.
Marble inscribed base, ca. 2nd century AD. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (74.51.2431). CC0.
Marble fragment of a votive relief with Athena, ca. 405–390 BC. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1989.281.59). CC0.
Marble head and torso of Athena, 1st–2nd century AD. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (24.97.15). CC0.
Marble head of Athena, ca. 27 BC – AD 68. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (12.157). CC0.
Head of a youth from a marble stele (grave marker), ca. 525 BC. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (42.11.36). CC0.

Manuscripts

The reader's Manuscript panel shows pages of real manuscripts from the libraries' and projects' own image servers; no photograph is copied to this site. Which pages hold which work comes from each library's catalogue (src/data/manuscripts.ts).

Venetus A (Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Marc. gr. Z. 454 = 822): photographs and the index of every Iliad line on its page, the Homer Multitext project, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (the index: CC BY-NC 4.0, built by pipeline/build_manuscripts.py; for non-commercial use only, so it is kept apart from this site's openly licensed files).
The Medicean manuscript of Aeschylus and Sophocles (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 32.9): photographs, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Teca digitale, for personal and non-commercial use; contents by folio from Biblissima.
Plato, Paris grec 1807: Source gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque nationale de France (free non-commercial reuse); contents by folio from the BnF's Archives et manuscrits.

Maps

The land and sea on the Periplus: NASA Earth Observatory, Blue Marble: Next Generation with topography and bathymetry, July 2004, by Reto Stöckli; public domain. Prepared for the map by pipeline/build_relief.py.
Coastlines, seas and lakes: Ancient World Mapping Center, geodata, ODbL 1.0, derived from the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World.
Places: Pleiades, CC BY 3.0, matched to the names in GLAUx (above).

Fonts and software

EB Garamond (the English), by Georg Duffner and Octavio Pardo. SIL Open Font License 1.1.
GFS Didot (titles, the Greek names and the logo), by Greek Font Society. SIL Open Font License 1.1.
Gentium Book Plus (the Greek being read), by SIL International. SIL Open Font License 1.1.
three.js (the potter's vase), by three.js authors. MIT.
abcjs (the lyre's sheet music), by Paul Rosen. MIT.
saxes, by Louis-Dominique Dubeau and contributors. ISC.
Next.js and React, by Vercel and Meta. MIT.
Zustand, by Poimandres. MIT.
supabase-js (accounts, the Agora and the Pnyx), by Supabase. MIT.
OpenSeadragon (the reader's manuscript viewer), by OpenSeadragon contributors. BSD 3-Clause.
Lucide (the signs on the buttons; the lyre's is the site's own), by Lucide Contributors, and Cole Bemis as part of Feather. ISC.