Canon of Greek Authors and Works

[First posted in AWOL 15 July 2009. Updated 6 September 2015]

The TLG? Online Canon of Greek Authors and Works

The TLG? Canon of Authors and Works is a searchable database and a bibliographic guide to the authors and works included in the TLG? Digital Library. It provides biographical information about each author (i.e. date by century and epithets that identify the place of birth or literary activity and the genre each author is associated with). Each author is identified by a four-digit number; each work is identified by a three-digit number. For example, Homer is author 0012. Homer's Iliad is identified as 0012.001. The structure of each text is further identified by its particular citation. To use the same example, line 1 in book 1 in Homer's Iliad is 0012.001.1.1. The TLG Canon is a well-established standard used by all digital projects across the globe.

The Canon represents many years of research conducted by TLG staff members. A printed version of the Canon (Luci Berkowitz and Karl A. Squitier, Thesaurus Linguae Graecae Canon of Greek Authors and Works, 3rd edition, Oxford University Press) was published in 1990. The Online Canon, now edited by Project Director, Maria Pantelia, has grown substantially since the early 1990s, especially as the TLG expanded into the Byzantine period. The Online Canon database currently contains over 12,000 bibliographical records and is regularly updated to include new entries as they are added to the TLG? Digital Library

The TLG? Online Canon of Greek Authors and Works is available in open access. It is not behind the TLG subscribers' firewall.