Roadmap: what comes next

Phonology. How Greek sounded. It opens with First steps, a first tour of the sounds for beginners: the letters, vowels long and short, the consonants and the syllable, with recordings to hear. Then come the sounds one by one; syllables and their length; the pitch accent and the morae; the pronunciation systems in use today, compared; and a sound lab that turns a voice into pictures.

Metre. It opens with First steps, a first tour for beginners: rhythm by length, the signs, long and short syllables, and a line each of Homer, Sappho and drama to try. Then come the ground rules: quantity, the signs, prosody, and the units of verse; the Greek accent and its relation to metre; and how the texts reached us.

Verse forms. One page for each family of metres, each with a worked example scanned syllable by syllable.

Dialects and styles. The literary dialects and the kinds of poetry that go with them.

Music. The music Greek poetry was sung to: a course in the basic ideas of music theory, with sounds to hear; the notation, scales and rhythms; the instruments; performance; and the surviving scores.

Poets and playwrights. A page for each poet or group of poets, from Homer to the late empire. Each page describes the poet and scans poems or passages line by line, with the Greek text, a translation and the metre.

Resources. The Bibliography, with the licences of everything quoted and how to cite the site; a searchable Glossary of terms, works and names; and the Image credits for every picture.

Works and comparisons

Simonides’ Thermopylae song. Nine lyric lines, with a translation, a syllable-by-syllable scan and synthetic pronunciation. Smyth’s text and printed analysis provide a comparison with Simonides’ elegiac epigrams.

Menander’s Dyskolos 1–4. Pan’s opening speech shows how resolution expands a comic trimeter from twelve syllables to fifteen. The displayed Greek, scan and synthetic recording agree; the notes distinguish the text source from the modern metrical guide.

Medea 627–662 and 976–1001. Two further choruses, with Dale’s analyses, paired responding lines and audible opening rhythms. The notes explain where a transmitted reading does not fit its responding line; the scan preserves that difficulty.

Greek metres in Latin. Virgil’s hexameter, Catullus’ hymn to Diana and Horace’s Sapphic stanza set Latin examples beside their Greek forms, with marked syllables and synthetic audio.

Praxilla’s scorpion skolion. A sixteen-syllable line with a scanned greater asclepiad, a translation and synthetic pronunciation. The notes explain Bergk’s metrical cross-reference and the disputed attribution.

Further texts

Erinna’s Distaff. The Erinna page already treats her epigrams. A papyrus lesson needs the original edition images, so that surviving letters, gaps and supplements can be distinguished. The required PSI IX 1090 pages are XI, XIII–XIV and 137–144, identified in Neri’s bibliography; those original pages have not yet been read.^[1]

Corinna 654, column ii. The Corinna page scans columns i and iii. Column ii still needs a reusable text and a checked analysis that distinguish the damaged papyrus from later supplements.

Further drama and lyric. Each additional passage needs a checked text, colometry and analysis. The Bibliography distinguishes openly licensed texts from editions consulted for comparison.

Notes

1. ^ Neri 2015, p. 76.

Terms and analyses. A comparison of West, Maas, Dale and Hephaestion separates different names for the same quantities from different ways of grouping them. Worked examples show what each notation describes.

Published schemes. Cola, periods, responsion and editorial signs, explained beside scanned Greek. The guide compares the printed schemes of West, Dale and Lourenço without treating their symbols as interchangeable.

Accentual verse. A Byzantine twelve-syllable book epigram and Romanos’ Nativity opening show syllable count and stress alongside the earlier quantitative models. Numbered diagrams and synthetic pronunciation make the divisions audible; the recordings do not reconstruct chant.

A sample apparatus. A line of Aristophanes’ Knights shows how a short critical note records competing readings and how the choice affects a scan.

The Bibliography records the sources already used. These editions would support further comparisons and passages:

Diggle’s Euripidis Fabulae I is now available for comparison: the two new Medea choruses have been checked in it, including the disputed close discussed in the 976–1001 notes. Their quoted Greek remains attributed to Murray’s openly licensed text.

Modern editions are consulted for readings and analysis; their texts, apparatus and commentary are not reproduced at length.