Musaios: A Catalogue of Classical Greek and Latin Texts

Musaios is a search engine which enables you to search the Thesaurus Lingua Graecae (TLG) and the Packard Humanities Institute index of classical texts (see grklat.html for more information about Musaios and related resources). These two databases contain the full texts of most of the major classical works of Greek and Latin. Information is retrievable in the original languages and in a Greek font.

Examining Full Texts Go to the File Menu when you have opened up Musaios. Click on Open under File. You will be presented with a list of authors. you can scroll down through this list more rapidly by typing a few letters. By clicking on a given author, you will be shown the list of his works available. If you select a specific work, the full text, as it has been recovered, of that work will be displayed within the Microsoft Word program which will simultaneously open along with the Musaios search engine.

Warning: Many of the existing classical texts have been passed down only in fragments. The small size of a given text on Musaios is thus not an indication of its actual original length, but of what has been preserved.

Searching the Database

By clicking on the Search menu, you will be given the opportunity to search for a specific term or name. You can search within a list of specific authors or one author by Adding them to the list on the right hand column. You can also choose to search through all the authors available by clicking on Add All.

These searches take a long time; do not overuse them. Once you have selected your authors, click on the Search button to type in your specific search terms. The computer will then begin the process of searching. You can choose to search either a general character string or an exact word match. Once your search has been processed, you can view results. Unfortunately, you can only check results by clicking on each author that you searched and checking through them to see if any results were produced. If any were, you can then go to the context of the search term in the text of that author.

Searching the Thesaurus Lingua Graecae Index

You can also directly search for Greek words in the Thesaurus Lingua Graecae Index. This is located under both the File menu and the Search menu as the TLG Word Index. Use the Greek letters to type a search request, which will then be searched and located by author and text. The context of a specific word can then be viewed. This search engine is relatively fast.

Printing and Saving

You can print and save directly from Musaios, either with a "Print Screen" command or by highlighting a selection and having that printed. Musaios works with the Microsoft Word program: all documents you open after searching for them with the search engine will be opened within Microsoft Word. You can then print and save as per any standard word processing document.

For More Information

Consult the on-line help or the Musaios user manual. You can also examine grklat.htm for more information about Yale's classical databases.

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© 2007 Yale University Library
This file last modified 07/16/01
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