Resources

Texts

The following websites provide ancient texts. Most of these are from Latin and Greek writers. Works are usually available both in translation and in the original language (although Greek texts are sometimes a little harder to find than Latin, because of the difficulties of displaying polytonic Greek font online).

Classical texts

These texts include pagan authors (all the big ones, including Plato and Cicero), as well as some early Church Fathers and Christian texts such as Minucius Felix’s Octavius.

• Perseus Digital Library – highly recommended. Provides many tools for reading texts, such as searchable Latin and Greek dictionaries which recognise the morphology of any given word.
• The Latin Library
• Lacus Curtius

Church Fathers in English translation

• Christian Classics Ethereal Library – Early Church Fathers
• New Advent – Church Fathers
• earlychristianwritings.com – Early Church Fathers

Church Fathers in original languages

NB: a very large proportion of the documents in the Patrologia Latina and Graeca have not yet been translated into English. To help find the author you want, Wikipedia has provided a list of Contents for the Patrologia Latina (here) and the Patrologia Graeca (here).

Patrologia Latina:

• Documenta Catholica Omnia
• Roger Pearse’s PDFs of the Patrologia Latina

Patrologia Graeca:

• graeca.patristica.net – a complete catalogue of downloadable PDFs from Google Books
• Roger Pearse’s PDFs of the Patrologia Graeca

Other sources for Christian texts in original languages:

• Sant’ Agostino – The works of Augustine in Latin.

Christian Scripture

Easily searchable English translations of the Bible:

• Bible Hub
• Bible Gateway

Hebrew, Greek, Latin Bibles:

• Parallel Hebrew Old Testament
• Septuagint (LXX) – the Ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament. It was translated in Alexandria, Egypt, from roughly 300BC to about 100 AD. Was used by the Apostles in the New Testament when they quoted from scripture.
• Greek New Testament
• Latin Vulgate (Clementine) – the Latin Vulgate was the translation most people read from in the Western Roman Empire from the late fourth century onwards. The Clementine Vulgate is a revised edition of this text published under the reign of Pope Clement VIII (in reaction to the Reformation), so some of the wording read by medieval Christians may have been revised in this text.

Manuscripts

• British Library: Digitised Manuscripts – the illuminations are the highlight of this collection.
• Codex Sinaiticus – The oldest surviving Bible containing the complete New Testament. Along with the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Alexandrinus, it one of the three most important manuscripts for critical studies of the Bible text.

• University of Melbourne – Online Resources for Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Studies.
• List of Ancient Texts Online