wikiproject Classical Greece And Rome/Guides

We hope they help you have a richer experience of contributing to Wikipedia's coverage of the ancient world! In general, the guides are ordered from most simple to most specialised. However, we think there will be something useful here for all our project members. Please feel free to suggest a new guide on the talk page: new contributions, or suggestions from our users for improving existing contributions, are always welcome.

Classics scholarship are often locked up in dusty libraries that nobody except academics and students can access, or behind paywalls that can't be bypassed without paying exorbitant subscription fees. However, classicists are increasingly doing more to open research resources to the public, and Wikipedia is at the forefront of that movement.

Wiki movements

Oxford University Press

Reliable translations with expert commentary and notes are available in the Oxford World Classics series, which have a distinctive white cover with red trim and are available at reasonable price in most good mainstream and independent bookstores. If you have a primary text in mind, consult the catalogue to see whether the source is available in the OWC collection:

• Oxford World Series: The Complete List 2013 [catalogue], pp. 38–41, Oxford University Press, global.oup.com (2013).

Loeb Classical Library

The Loeb Classical Library (LCL) is a comprehensive collection of translated Latin and Ancient Greek works; the Loeb series presents the original on the left page of each volume and a reliable English translation on the right. A number of the original Loeb prints are now available online, because they are out-of-copyright; see, for example, edonnelly.com. Most of the ancient Greek and Latin literature is part of the Loeb collection; if you find Loeb books online with a translation marked as taken from the original [insert some year from early 20th century; 1912 is common] Loeb version, you can be confident it will be sufficient for occasional reference.

Modern Loeb versions can be found on the Wiki Library, which (as of September 2022) recently gained access to Loeb Online (Wikipedia Library link).

Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft

The Realencyclopädie (abbreviated RE or PW) is one of the largest encyclopaedias ever published. The first edition was started by August Pauly in 1839 and completed in 1852. A second and much more ambitious edition began under the leadership of Georg Wissowa in 1890, and was only completed in 1978. Written in German over 82 volumes, it is a difficult work to read, but an invaluable source for the study of ancient history. It is important to note the publication date of a given volume; because of advances in scholarship and discoveries of new evidence, some of its articles are now quite outdated. Almost every person or place we know of has an entry in the RE, and it is especially useful to write about lesser-known persons and topics. Many of the most influential German classical scholars participated in its production, and about 1,100 authors contributed articles.

The German Wikisource has an ongoing project to reproduce all the RE articles, so it is easier to translate them.

Other online resources

Editors may wish to provide pronunciation guides for words or phrases that are not reasonably familiar, or the pronunciation of which may not be apparent from their spelling. Pronunciations representing Classical Greek and Latin, as well as modern English pronunciation, are preferred, but pronunciations representing specific dialects or eras (such as Ionian Greek or Ecclesiastical Latin) may be provided where appropriate. Some flexibility should be allowed, as pronunciation varied even in the classical period, as well as in modern English (for example, the pronunciation of Latin by English speakers changed dramatically during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; some words or names may be pronounced according to either method).

Some suggested sources for this purpose include:

• Vox Graeca: The Pronunciation of Classical Greek, by W. Sidney Allen
• Vox Latina: A Guide to the Pronunciation of Classical Latin, by W. Sidney Allen
• Reading Greek, from the Joint Association of Classical Teachers
• Reading Latin, by Peter V. Jones and Keith C. Sidwell
• Wheelock's Latin, by Frederic M. Wheelock
• Bantam's New College Latin & English Dictionary
• Cassell's Latin & English Dictionary

Editors may use different methods of representing pronunciation. See Wiki's pronunciation respelling key, Pronunciation respelling for English, and IPA/Latin. Due to the high rate of errors in adding IPA pronunciations, editors whose familiarity with IPA is limited are encouraged to use pronunciation respelling instead.

If the pronunciation of a word or phrase requires substantial explanation or has several variants, please consider using a footnote or a separate section of the article for this purpose.