by Julian Morgan, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

A huge range of Perseus resources are available online, at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu. This article will first examine how Perseus can be used to prepare texts in an English-speaking environment and will then consider how this can be made applicable in non-English-speaking schools.

Perseus in an English-speaking environment

The UK system of education has two tiers of public examination at its upper levels. GCSEs are taken by students aged 16, in Year 11. After this, A levels are taken by students aged 18. Greek A level is taken by a tiny number of students nationally, no more than about 200. So, as a consequence, the subject is offered by only a small number of schools and in many cases it is relegated to the status of lunchtime club or after school activity. Using time effectively is essential in this process.

Recently, a student of mine at Derby Grammar School was able to take Greek GCSE at age 14, and then A Level at age 16, gaining top grades along the way. Without the support of Perseus, neither he nor I would have succeeded in this process. The student prepared all his A level texts, including selections from Euripides' Bacchae and Homer's Iliad, by sifting through the texts, looking at vocabulary, using the online dictionaries and morphological analysers inbuilt in Perseus online. Each word looked up was copied and pasted into an Excel spreadsheet, and he brought the printout to each lesson. During the class, we translated the text and had chance to talk about literary effects and content, with my student amending his notes by hand as we went.
In lessons, I referred to the CD-ROM version of Perseus, allowing for very swift retrieval of text, translation, encyclopaedia, atlas, morphological analyser and dictionary. Given that the student was exceptionally gifted, I was pushed to my limit on occasion, but we found ourselves able nonetheless to work through around 40 lines of the Iliad in around 30 minutes. The text was better researched and better prepared by my student than it could have been using traditional methods and I was supported more effectively than could have been the case with just book-based resources (though these were also available to me in the room, at the time). The student found by experimentation that his preparation time was cut down by about 75% using the online resources, as opposed to using traditional text, dictionary, commentary, grammar book and translation.

It is hard to imagine any better way of teaching Greek in the high pressured, time challenged environment facing British teachers of Classics. Much of Perseus is English language based, so its support for other European teachers of Classics may be less effective than it was for me, but nonetheless, the grammatical analyser uses vocabulary which is commonly accessible to all, based as much of it is on Latinate terminology. As a final point, it is worth saying that the student mentioned here was the youngest candidate nationally to sit the examination in 2002. This achievement is truly exceptional, in a subject which is normally never taken early by students at A level. It may well be the case, however, that only such exceptional candidates would benefit as much as he did from the experience, which could prove much less effective for other, less able students.

Perseus for non-English-speaking students

The process described above could obviously be of great interest for native English speakers, or for students in countries other than the UK, whose English is good enough to allow them to benefit from it. But what of Classics students around Europe who would like to use Perseus in this kind of way, but cannot, because the linguistic challenges are simply too great? It seems that they may be missing out - or maybe not?

One key aspect of the Perseus online system is that morphological analyses of words are given in tables (see above). In terms of the words used, it should be noted that much of the linguistic terminology is similar. Latinate terms like infinitive do not vary much from English to French (infinitif), to Italian (infinito), to German (Infinitiv). So when a student calls up a text in Latin or Greek, there is not necessarily a barrier to understanding this part of the process. The real issue arises in using the dictionary facility, where Perseus looks up words and displays their meaning in English.

On strategy might be to open an extra window in your Internet browser, logging on to google (http://www.google.com). Now click on Language Tools, and a window will appear with a translation facility from English to German, Spanish, French, Italian or Portuguese. Keep this window open, while using Perseus in the ways described above, but each time, copy the text from the second cell displayed in the Perseus Word Study Tool, eg the English meaning, into the google translation box. The process will certainly take a little longer, but early results suggest that the levels of accuracy created are quite high. Take a little time to study the screenshot below, to see text, analysis, translation in English and google translation in French.


The following review appeared in the JACT Bulletin, Autumn 2000

First released in the UK in 1997, Perseus 2 has now been published with the same content in a new, platform independent version, running on Mac or PC. This is excellent news for PC users, who up until now have had to depend on the Perseus website, at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu. PIP (Platform Independent Perseus) comes in two versions - Full and Concise.

Full PIP comes on four CD-ROMs and contains 24,000 colour images of the ancient Greek world, including 14,500 pictures of vases, 1,000 colour maps and satellite images, and 3.4 million words of Greek texts. It has a collection of philological tools which permit texts to be studied, analysed and compared. Concise PIP comes on one as opposed to four CD-ROMs and lacks about 18,000 graphic images, though it does include thumbnail views of them all. Everything else works in the same way as the Full version.As ever, I acknowledge our debt to Greg Crane and the Perseus team at Tufts University, whose work is so vitally important to the future of Classics worldwide: Perseus is without doubt the single most important piece of classical software in the world and it is wonderful news that it can now be bought for all computer users. The Mac implementation of PIP seems identical to the PC one and the same CD-ROM can be used on both types of computer with equal ease. Especially impressive is the installation procedure, which takes very little effort, time or hard disk space. It is possible, though not for the fainthearted novice, to customise the paths used, so if you only have one CD drive but want to use images from more than one of the CD-ROMs, you can run PIP by saving files to your hard disk (2 gigabytes are required to store all the information included) without having to insert and eject different disks all the time.

Perseus is a must-have acquisition for any department where Greek is taught, or any other course which covers Greek art, architecture or history. For those schools where limited use of ICT is made, PIP adds a huge amount to the departmental resource cupboard, offering a comprehensive collection of materials to extend alike to teachers and students of the Greek world. Its complexity must not be underestimated, however, which makes it especially disappointing that YUP has decided not to distribute a printed manual for the new software: this can be downloaded and printed via the Internet but this is hardly a way forward.

There are other disappointments. I found it impossible to make the Greek words in proximity search work on either Mac or PC system and noted with some despair that it is no longer possible to view English or Greek texts on their own. The only possible combination now is to have Greek on the left and English on the right, so Classical Civilisation students will be confronted every time with their inability to decipher Greek. Furthermore, you cannot even adjust the display by sliding the division point between the two languages, a basic feature in both Perseus 1 and 2 for the Mac.

Not all the site plans have working image buttons as in Perseus 2, though the composite site plans seem fully equipped in this regard. Other missing components include Jebb's notes of Oedipous Tyrannos and an apparent reduction in the usefulness of the Search Saver,which formerly could save to the Notebook on a Mac where the search results could be used in subsequent sessions to provide active links. All of these appear as oversights in comparison to Perseus 2 for Mac.

My advice for PC users is to buy the Full version of PIP as soon as possible and spend time acclimatising to its vagaries. It is quicker and more reliable than the Internet and having an installed base is in my opinion always preferable to using a website. For Mac users, however, I would give different advice: if you already have Perseus 2 and won't need to use a PC, don't bother with PIP - what you have already works better and you probably also have an excellent printed manual to go with it. It is very much to be hoped that PIP will continue to be developed both in terms of the software and the content on the database.