Perseus Collection

Logos 4.3 and the Duke Papyri Collection

The Perseus Collection for Logos includes the Duke Papyri Collection.  I am just starting appreciate the extent of this collection of papyri, but I can say that this is the most valuable of the sub-collections in the massive collection of books Logos is offering for free.

What are the “papyri”? Papyrus (plural, papyri) is a writing material made from reed-like plant and is more or less like paper.  While this material is may not seem as durable as vellum or a potsherd, there are papyri documents which date back to the second millennium BC.  While the material could potentially be found in any location, the climate of Egypt is ideal for preserving papyri so a large percentage of these documents are Egyptian in origin.  The papyri may contain biblical books or other classical literature, but likely as not a collection of papyri will contain receipts, legal documents, government memos, perhaps even personal letters.  Papyri documents often give a reader access to the “normal life” of ancient people since we are reading their mail or legal documents.  There are two problems with this material, however.  First, most of the papyri are fragmentary, missing letters, words and even whole lines.  This makes reconstructing the text extremely difficult.  Second, the content of the fragment is often difficult because the content is obscure.  I am not sure a future scholar could examine the receipts in my wallet and make much sense of my life.  (Perhaps they might think I worship a goddess named Starbucks since I have so many texts with her name.)

What is the Duke Papyri Collection?  The Duke Papyri collection consists of about 256 volumes of published papyri fragments, ostraca, inscriptions, and other Greek texts.  Many of these Logos books are actually multi-volume series published over many years. (Here is a master list of papyri, inscription and ostraca with full publication dates.)  Not everything on this index page is included in the Logos package.  For example, P.Worp, (Sixty-Five Papyrological Texts Presented to Klaas A. Worp on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday) is not included, possibly because of the recent publication date (Leiden, 2008).

Not all the documents in a particular volume are included, sometimes because they are not in Greek, other times (I assume) because of copyright issues.  For example, the volume entitled Papyri Greek and Egyptian Edited by Various Hands in Honour of Eric Gardner Turner on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, ed. P.J. Parsons, J.R. Rea and others (Egypt Exploration Society, Graeco-Roman Memoirs 68; London 1981), (P.Turner) should have 55 items, but in the Logos collection numbers 1-15 are missing, as is number 55 (which was in Coptic).  According to the Duke site, document 15 was in Demotic, but it may be that documents 1-15 were in Demotic and not included for that reason.  Without looking at a physical copy of the book, I am not sure.  Omitting non-Greek papyri is the norm for the collection, likely because that data was simply not collected in to the Perseus project in the first place.

Even with the omissions, Logos provides an impressive collection of texts.  In the next installment, I will discuss some of the more important items in the collection and how Logos can be used to navigate this massive amount of data.  Later, I will briefly discuss the value of this material for NT exegesis.

Logos 4.3 and the Perseus Collection – Exploring Plutarch

For one of my first attempts to work with the Perseus collection in Logos I chose Plutarch.  There are several reasons for this.  First, Plutarch was active in the late first and early second century (c. A. D. 46-120).  This makes him a good “parallel” for New Testament Greek.  There are many words and syntactical features which may be used to illuminate texts in the Greek New Testament.  Second, BDAG, the standard Greek lexicon for New Testament Greek, references Plutarch thousands of times.  Third, I happen to own several paper copies of Moralia so I can check the text in a printed source.  Last, I think that Moralia is particularly good reading in English or Greek.

Plutarch is primarily known for two major works, Moralia, and Parallel Lives.  Moralia is 14 volumes in the Loeb Library, Lives is 11 volumes.  The English text from the Loeb editions appears in most cases in the Perseus Classics collection, including the more recently published editions (Volume 13 appeared in 1976, the translation by Harold Cherniss is in the Perseus Collection). In the Perseus Classics collection there are 369 books from Plutarch, including all of the sections of both Moralia and Parallel Lives.  They are listed under their essay title rather than by the larger collection name. For example, Comparison of Agesilaus and Pompey is an individual book in this collection rather than part of Lives.

There are 3273 references to Plutarch in BDAG, 2718 of which are to Moralia.  BDAG references Lives by tractate name (Plut., Solon 91, for example).  Unfortunately, BDAG references Moralia by the Loeb edition edited by William Paton.  This makes finding a reference from BDAG in the Logos Plutarch collection very difficult.  For example, under ἁγιοφόρος (holy things), there is a reference to a similar word, ἱεραφόροι, Plutarch, Mor. 352b.  Plutarch describes “holy items” in the cult of Isis.  By consulting the index at Attalus I can determine that 352b is in a essay called Isis and Osirus (Loeb 5:1-99), or in Latin De Iside et Osiride in the Perseus collection.  Since the text in the Perseus collection is not indexed with the Loeb system, I was only able to find this particular text by using crtl-F, switching my keyboard to Greek, and typing in a portion of the word.  I did find it first try (it was in section four), but this is a round-about way of working through a text.  On the other hand, I am not sure that it is even possible to create some sort of system which translates the now-standard Loeb index to find sections in the older non-Loeb editions.  nevertheless, at this point you cannot click on a reference in BDAG and automatically launch that book as you can for The NT or LXX.  I would like to see the sections in Logos marked with the paragraphs from the Loebs simply to find my way around the longer paragraphs.

Most texts are available in both Greek and English, many in separate editions.  For example De tranquilitate animi is in the collection four times.  There are two Greek editions by W. C. Helmbold and Gregorius N. Bernardakis, and two English translations by William W. Goodwin (1878) and Helmbold.   I would have liked the original publication information.  I found Goodwin’s English edition online, published in 1878 by Little, Brown and Company, with an introduction by Ralph Waldo Emerson.  The Greek text edited by Bernardakis is the text found in the Loeb volumes.

Plutarch, Moralia Volume II Collection

The good news is that most (if not all) of Plutarch included in this collection is identical to the Loeb editions.  I checked by 1959 reprint of the Loeb 1926 edition of  Moralia II against the Perseus Collection.  The titles are given in English, but there is an index with the tradition order and Latin titles.  I had used Dinner of the Seven Wise Men (Septem sapientium convivium) for a paper on Luke 14 a few years ago, so I was vaguely familiar with the contents of this amusing banquet scene.  The Greek in the Perseus Collection is edited by Bernardakis, although I noticed a few differences from the printed edition with respect to accenting and punctuation. The preface to my printed copy indicates that as this volume was going to press, a new edition of Moralia was released and a comparison was made.  Babbitt is unimpressed with this new edition, so I doubt there are any serious changes in the actual Greek.   I was please to find that the English introduction to the essay is included in the Perseus Collection, and the English translation was identical.

Since these texts are identical to the Loeb edition, I used the index in the printed volume to “recreate” the Moralia II in the Loeb Library as a collection in Logos.  To do this, select Tools>Collections, and then open your library (ctrl+L).  Search for the title (for example, De superstitione), drag and drop the title onto the area which says “plus these resources.”  I put all the essays which are in volume two into a single collection, allowing me to search that volume for any text.  This method could be repeated for each volume, or if you have the time for the entire Moralia, or the whole of Plutarch.  I did not have the time to create a larger collection for this review, but it seems a simple enough task.  Perhaps Logos can add these collections pre-made in the future.  I think that it would be very valuable to be able to search on a Greek word throughout Plutarch and compare his usage to the NT, the “collection” feature of Logos 4 makes this possible.

Logos is taking pre-orders for the the Perseus collection through September 30.  There is no cost for the collection, but you must have Logos 4.3 installed to use this massive resource.  Your pre-order puts you in line to download the collection when it becomes available.   The base package for Logos 4.3 is available free as is the iPad and Andriod app.

Logos 4.3 and the The Perseus Collection – First Look

About a month ago Logos Bible Software announced the release of the Perseus collection, a massive library of Greek and Latin resources for classical studies along with English translations, lexicons and other secondary resources.  The Perseus collection itself has been around the internet for years, but Logos has taken the individual books are converted the text to their book format.  This means that the text is indexed and searchable in the Logos Library system. More importantly, they have tagged much of the Greek text so that lexical and syntactical information appears in the same way it does for the Greek New Testament or LXX.

Logos graciously allowed me to download four of the collections early so I could “kick the tires” (they really said that) and provide some basic review and comment on the usefulness of the Perseus Collection.  While I have just scratch the surface of this massive collection, I can say with confidence that it is well worth your time and effort to download the books and learn to use these resources as a part of the Logos library.  Since the books are free, there is no financial reason not to get the Collection!  I plan several more installments to this review, including some comments on the usefulness of the Collections for biblical research and the usability of the Collections on an iPad.  I will review the Duke Papyri collection in a separate installment since it merits special attention.

Classics Workspace

To test the Perseus collection, I created a workspace with lexicons in a left panel and texts in the right panels.  I have the Greek text on top and the English on the bottom.  I have the texts linked so as a move the Greek, the English syncs up automatically.  I recommend you create a workspace for classics study that you like and save it for easy recall.  I chose Herodotus as a test case, with the English translation by A. D. Goodley and Commentary by W. W. How.  I navigated to book seven, section one, Darius’ response to his defeat at Marathon.

The Greek text functions exactly like the Greek New Testament normally does in Logos.  First, hover over a word and the form is identified in a box at the bottom of the Greek window. These identifications will be as accurate as anything else in Logos, I rarely quibble with the parsing provided.  I did notice that the perfect passive participle of χαράσσω which appears in the first line was identified correctly, but the box contained all three possibilities for the case ending (masc acc, neut nom or acc). As a result, the identification runs across the entire screen!

Double click on a word and a lexicon will launch.  I have BDAG set up as the first in my list of lexicons, so if the form appears in BDAG, Logos  will go right to that entry.  If the word is not in BDAG, Logos will proceed to the next lexicon in your preferred lexicon list.  This caught me off-guard at first because χαράσσω is not in BDAG, but it is in LEH, the Septuagint lexicon.  Logos did not look in Liddell and Scott since that is third in my list.  Usually when I work in the New Testament I am more likely to check LXX usage.  For classical work, I recommend changing the order of resources so that BDAG and Liddell and Scott are the top two resources.

Word Study

Select a word, right click and then select Bible Word Study.  I chose ἀγγελία for this example, the third word in book 7.  The word only appears twice in the New Testament, both in 1 John.  The Bible Word Study tool only gives details for New Testament usage, but it will provide links to all lexicons in your library (Liddell and Scott, Louw and Nida, but also TDNT, or EDNT).  At the bottom of the page there is a list of uses of the word in other Greek resources you might own:  LXX, the Apostolic Fathers, Pseudepigrapha, Josephus, Philo, and now, Classics. In the case of ἀγγελία, there are 177 other uses of the word in resources labeled Classics. I click on Classics to open the list, and Logos will build a concordance-style list showing the word in context.  These entries are all click-able so I can go to the greater context.

This is impressive, but several observations come to mind.  I would love to have the English and Greek books paired so that they automatically launch together.  Most people who use this library will not read Greek well enough not to need the English to make sense of the context.  It is easy enough to open the library and launch the English translation, but automatic is better.  The opening the list took a bit longer than I would have liked, but that may have had to do with the number of resources I had open at the time. Third, I am not sure this category includes all the texts in the new Perseus collection.  My example search found 177 examples in 68 resources (in 1.51 seconds).  I know that there are more Latin than Greek resources, but it is possible there are a few which are not included in the collection, or that all the resources have yet to be tagged.  I know the Papyri are not tagged.  Still, I have 177 examples of ἀγγελία in classical sources to comb through.

I have barely scratched the surface of this collection, suffice to say that these classical Greek texts work as well as any Greek text in Logos.  If you have not already pre-ordered the Perseus collection, now is the time.

Edit:  Here is Jim West’s review of the Perseus Collection, with quite a few additional screen shots.