With the cooperation and support of
The Database of Classical Scholars is a multi-faceted database that aims to provide biographical and bibliographical information on classical scholars from the period associated with classical scholarship as currently understood, from the end of the eighteenth century and the publication of F.A. Wolf's Prolegomena zu Homer (1795) to the current day. Each entry is accompanied by an appreciation of the scholar's career by an expert and where possible, a portrait. This is a work of international cooperation with an advisory committee composed of experts in the history of classical scholarship not only in North America, but in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Italy.
- The Center for Digital Humanities, University of South Carolina
- The School of Arts & Sciences and Department of Classics, Rutgers University
- the Society for Classical Studies, which has endorsed the project
- the Institute for Digital Archaeology, for video content
The Editorial Committee consists of :
There have been several attempts to provide a comprehensive history of Classical Scholarship. They range from the lists of classicists compiled by W. Pökel for his Philologisches Schriftstellerlexikon (Leipzig 1882) to Sir J.E. Sandys' monumental three-volume History of Classical Scholarship (Cambridge, 1903-8) to Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf's Geschichte der Philologie (Leipzig, 1921) to Alfred Gudeman's Outlines of the History of Classical Scholarship (3rd ed., Boston, 1897). In late years Briggs's A Biographical Dictionary of North American Classicists (1994) was the first attempt to bring together biographical data on a significant number of classicists from Canada and the United States.
- Ward Briggs, Columbia, South Carolina
- Corey Brennan, New Brunswick, NJ
- Serena Connolly, New Brunswick, NJ
- Lee Pearcy, Philadelphia, PA
- Michele Ronnick, Detroit, MI
- Christopher Stray, Swansea, Wales
- Graham Whitaker, Glasgow
The database is fully searchable on all fields: Name, Birth, Marriage, Education, Professional Experience, Death, Dissertation Title, Publications, Festschriften, Kleine Schriften, Biographical Sources, and the Author of the appreciation. One can readily find all classicists in the database who received degrees at the University of Chicago or taught at the University of Virginia, or were born on November 26. Software has been developed by USC's Center for Digital Humanities and will be continually refined at the new home of the Database, Rutgers University.
In its initial stages, the Database has drawn or will draw on five ready resources of data.
Stage 1:
The importation of data for the 600 classicists cataloged in Ward Briggs's Biographical Dictionary of North American Classicists (1994). The book has been optically scanned and the entries arranged in a common format. Moreover, entries for many dozens of classicists who have died since the publication of the BDNAC are included, drawing from memorial notices in bulletins of the APA, CAAS and CAMWS. Portraits of a large number of the subjects (not a feature of the original publication) have been added.
Stage 2:
Video clips provided to the SCS by the Classics Conclave have been mounted on our site and links posted on the SCS website. These interviews, conducted in 2012 with distinguished classicists from North America and the United Kingdom form the germ of what is hoped to be a succession of oral histories with distinguished members of the profession. A new series of interviews commenced in January 2018.
Stage 3:
The introduction of a Wiki database for living classicists. The last work that contained significant biographical information, as well as areas of scholarly interest, was the fourth edition of The Directory of College and University Classicists in the United States and Canada edited by Lawrence E. Gaichas for the Classical Association of the Atlantic States in 1996. This was an invaluable source for looking up addresses, specialties, and credentials of living classicists and it is our aim to provide something like this with our Wiki database which will have the advantage of being as fully searchable as the data on deceased classicists. We have created a template in Microsoft Word that can easily be filled out with the same kinds of information we present for deceased classicists. We aim to send these templates to every member of the SCS and make the template downloadable on the SCS website so that members and non-members can list themselves in this section of the database.
Stage 4:
The library at Columbia University is home to the archive of Alfred Gudeman, born in Atlanta in 1862, a graduate of Columbia and the first American to receive a Ph.D. in Classics from the University of Berlin, he taught at Johns Hopkins, the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell University before emigrating to Germany in 1904. Gudeman was an energetic proponent of German scholarship and wrote A Manual of the History of Classical Philology that ran to eight editions in two different languages. Gudeman's most pertinent work for our purposes is his Imagines Philologorum (1911), a quarto-sized volume containing portraits and biographical information of 160 classical scholars beginning with Erasmus and running through the late nineteenth century. Gudeman continued to amass portraits and data on the scholars until the Nazis forced him and his family to be shipped to the Theresienstadt camp where he died in 1942. Before departing Berlin he entrusted his materials to his attorney with instructions to send them to the Columbia Library should anything happen to him. The materials, comprising six large envelopes of illustrative material (photographs, etchings and various types of reproductions) and biographical data for 560 classical scholars arrived at Columbia in 1952 where they remained unexamined until 1990 (Donna W. Hurley, "Alfred Gudeman, Atlanta, Georgia, 1862-Theresienstadt, 1942,"TAPhA 120 (1990) 355-81 and Donna W. Hurley, "Alfred Gudeman in Berlin 1935-1942," Latein und Griechisch in Berlin 35 (1991) 121-7) . We hope to employ graduate students to go through the archive and put the biographical data and portraits from both the Imagines material and the final, 497-page unpublished manuscript of his Manual into the form that will be usable by our database.
Stage 5:
The Catalogus Philologorum Classicorum is superintended by Prof. Franco Montanari at the University of Genoa. Initiated at a CNR conference in 1984 the project collects biographical data and to this point has chiefly been useful in gathering the names of nearly 9000 classicists worldwide. It has been online since 2003 within the website Aristarchus. To date, while the project has identified 8831 classicists and posted "cards" with name, date of birth and date of death for most of them on their website (http://www.aristarchus.unige.it/cphcl/schede.php), only 889 have any further information, usually necrologies from journals or newspapers posted as unsearchable PDF files. The accessible files are of no consistent format and cannot be searched against all the entries. Professor Montanari has agreed to be an advisory editor and to share his data with our project. We would thus need clerks to enter data from the accessible cards on the CPC website onto our template and add them to our database.
Stage 6:
Robert B. Todd's three-volume Dictionary of British Classicists (Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004) is a British counterpart to BDNAC: It contains biographies with publication information for approximately 700 British classicists from 1500 to 1960 CE. The work contains a great deal of data that would be useful for our project, but unlike the BDNAC, all the entries are written in continuous prose. We, therefore, need clerks to extract the information required by our template and enter it into our database. As with the BDNAC, there are no portraits of the subjects.
Readymade High-res Basemaps with Layers (click links to download)
GIS Data
The archaeological data, basemap, shapefiles, and optional layer files (see bottom of page for use of layer files) can be downloaded and assembled into a dynamic map using GIS software. The Corinth material is our work. It is followed by redistributed copies and modified versions of regional data with sources noted.Download
Corinth archaeological data: cover the Corinthia, the ancient city of Corinth, or the central archaeological site (WGS 84, zone 34N). We will add to these shapefiles when possible.
- City walls: line shapefile for the Classical and LR city walls.
- Monuments: these are non-adjacent overlapping polygons circumscribed around the subject with place/monument names attached.
- Sites: point file with archaeological sites and few museums in the Corinthia. Also in Google Earth KMZ.
- Central archaeological area, ca. 325 B.C.E: line file plan of the monuments of the main site just before the construction of the South Stoa.
- Peirene state plan: new topographical survey of the Peirene Fountain completed in 2006. Dangerous and unsurveyed areas were supplemented by Hill's drawings.
- Classical houses: Buildings I-IV were resurveyed for Corinth VII.6
- Underground water system: new survey data used to 'rubbersheet' Hill's plan of the Peirene underground tunnels.
Corinth orthophotos, DEMs, and other products: produced from low level aerial photos in Agisoft Photoscan. Corinth Archaeological Site, Scale 5cm pixels, UTM zone 34N
- Orthophotomosaic, GeoTif 169 Mb
- DEM (digital surface model), GeoTif 331 Mb
- 1 m contours, SHP 56 Mb
Peirene, Scale 5mm pixels, UTM zone 34N
- Orthophotomosaic, GeoTif, 236 Mb
Korakou, UTM zone 34N
- Orthophotomosaic 2015, 3cm pixels, GeoTif, 338 Mb
- DEM (digital surface model), 50cm pixels, GeoTif, 2 Mb
- 25 cm contours from 2002 survey, SHP, 1.3 Mb
- XYZ points from 2002 survey, TXT, 19 Kb
- State plan from Blegen 1921, GeoTif, 700 Kb
- Orthophotomosaic from 1962 aerial photos, GeoTif, 6 Mb
Historical maps of the Corinthia: These raster images are rubberheeted and georeferenced to modern control points in UTM, zone 34N. Each zipped file contains a TIF and a TFW world file. Francesco Morosini map of central Corinthia, 1687: 720Mb, Dated on Christmas day several months after his army made it's "fortunate shot" destroying the Ottoman powder magazine (the Parthenon) during the seige of Athens. It was drawn with south oriented to the top and split over six linen sheets. In this file it is reoriented north to the top and reassembled in one image before georeferencing. Ancient features, contemporary buildings and roads, fountains and springs, fortifications and towers, and topographic features are highlighted on this map. The area to the east of the Isthmus still has quite a bit of distortion. Pierre Peytier map of Ancient Corinth, 1829: 122Mb, a small but accurate survey by the Morea Expedition shows that the lines of many roads in the village remain unchanged.
- Ancient Place Names and Layer File (Pleiades): points, 6Mb. This modified version was translated from Pleiades original CSV to a shapefile.
- Ancient Theaters (geodata.gov.gr): 43 points, 4Kb. This ia a modified version in which Corinthian theaters were appended to the original file.
- Cities in English and Greek (geodata.gov.gr): points, 4Kb
- Cities in Greek (Geofabrik/OSM): points, 425Kb
- Coastline lines (Geofabrik/OSM); lines, 319Mb
- Coastline water polygon and Layer File (Geofabrik/OSM): polygons, 15Mb. For this modified version, we clipped the file to include the waters just beyond the borders of Greece.
- Modern administrative boundaries (geodata.gov.gr): Greece, line 8Mb; Kapodistrias plan 1997, polygon 6Mb; Kallikratis plan 2011, polygon 6Mb; Peripheries 2008, polygon 3.6Mb
- Natural Features like inland hydrology and forests with Layer File (Geofabrik/OSM): polygons, 12Mb
- Points of Interest (OSM): over 156,000 points in CSV format includes amenities, shops, historic, transportation, natural, etc.: edited file, 3.2Mb, and original 'flat' download, 3Mb. Geofabrik has convenient POI as well but the site far fewer points and less associated data.
- Railways and Layer File (Geofabrik/OSM): lines, 900Kb
- Roads and Layer File (Geofabrik/OSM): lines, 78Mb
- Rivers and Layer File (geodata.gov.gr): lines, 2Mb
- Settlements in English (geodata.gov.gr): points, 217Kb
- Urban Atlas cities (EEA): polygons, 185Mb, includes Athens, Thessaloniki, Patras, Iraklion, Larisa, Volos, Ioannina, Kavala, Kalamata (zones >100,000 pop.)
- Waterways and Layer File (Geofabrik/OSM): lines, 5Mb
- Corine Land Cover Inventory from 2000 and Layer File (geodata.gov.gr): polygons, 99Mb
Basemap, contours, and ASTER DEM: Coverage is 36-39 degrees latitude and 20-26 degrees longitude. ASTER GDEM is a product of METI and NASA. Bathymetry derived from EMODnet data
- Basemap.zip,118 Mb and BasemapWIthBathymetry.zip, 326 Mb: intended as a backdrop for the shapefiles on this page. The file is a zipped GeoTiff with a world file (.tfw) generated from the DEM below with naturally colored visualization (similar to the color maps at the top of the page) based on elevation, slope, and hillshade to provide a pleasant and informative background for other data. It retains the resolution of the original data which is nominally 1 arc-second or about 30 m per pixel, though actually less.
- Contour lines at 50 m interval and Layer File: lines generated from DEM, 15Mb
- Digital Elevation Model (DEM) and Layer File: raster, 88Mb. Mosaic from 1 degree x 1 degree DEMs.
- The European Environment Agency also has some very nice 1 arcsec (~30m) base maps derived from SRTM and ASTER GDEM.
- BathymetryDEM.zip, 929 Mb, from EMODnet data.
*Note that the rivers and place name data may seem repetitive but each dataset has strengths and weaknesses.*Greek names encoded with ISO 88597 and may not display properly in ArcGIS. Default encoding for ESRI must be set on Windows via "regedit" as per this ESRI support page.
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