Virgil would have felt neglected if we had forgotten him after giving Homer his own page. Thus we now have a separate page for Virgil as well.
We have been tidying up and expanding the classical authors throughout; you will, for example, find many more translations of Herodotus and Thucydides than we had before, and inferior scans are being replaced here and there with high-resolution scans.
We have been waiting fifteen years for a page of Homer in the Library. Was it worth the wait? Well, we have accumulated quite a pile of different translations by famous literary figures, including a large collection of different editions of Chapman’s Homer, the translation that moved Keats to wrote one of the most famous sonnets of all time.
For some unknowable reason we had left two of the most important Roman historians out of our collection of classical authors. That omission has now been rectified, and several translations of both Polybius and Livy will be found in the classical section of the Library.
The great classicist was also an essayist, dramatist, poet, and pamphleteer, and we have collected samples of Gilbert Murray in all his phases.
The eighteenth-century theologian widely regarded as the founder of modern critical study of the Bible and early Christian writings. His Large Collection of Ancient Jewish and Heathen Testimonies to the Truth of the Christian Religion is a uniquely valuable resource, including many non-Christian observations of early Christianity not to be found elsewhere in English.
St. Patrick’s own writings, early lives of Patrick, and some (mostly) scholarly studies of his life and times.
The stubborn fourth-century pagan Libanius, teacher of John Chrysostom and friend of Julian the Apostate, left a huge number of works behind him. Few are available in English in public-domain editions. Our collection of classical writers has what we were able to find in English, along with a few studies in French.
A Library of Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church, Anterior to the Division of East and West, was the title of a series of 48 volumes of English translations that came out of the Oxford Movement. Many of the volumes were later reprinted in the Ante-Nicene Fathers and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. But not all made it into those later series, and the Library of Fathers editions include notes that were omitted in the later editions. They are also typographically more pleasant to read. Thanks to the indefatigable Roger Pearse, we have a complete list of volumes now, with links to each volume in the Internet Archive or Google Books.
A page of the works of Dr. Johnson, along with some of the memoirs of his life and sayings.
Catalogues from record companies beginning in the early 1900s and going on to the late 1930s.
Telegrams were charged by the word, creating a strong incentive to pack as much meaning into an individual word as possible. Code-books were created so that two people using the same code could communicate very cheaply. If you agree, for example, that “shaggy” will mean “Do not sell on any account until further advice,” you have saved yourselves the expense of eight words. We have arranged these books by date, since it seemed the least arbitrary of all the arbitrary arrangements we considered. Today they are a priceless resource for historians and novelists: they tell us what sorts of messages people in various industries at various times considered it most important to be able to exchange efficiently.
A new page of Plato’s works is long overdue. We have the complete Loeb Classical Library set, the famous Jowett translations, the earlier translations by Sydenham and Taylor, and some miscellaneous translations of individual dialogues.
The Oriental Translation Fund of the Royal Asiatic Society has sponsored an immense treasury of English (and sometimes French) translations from Asian and Middle Eastern texts. In many cases, these are almost certainly the only translations that exist in English. Since the Fund had been funding for nearly two centuries, many of its projects are in the public domain. We have established separate pages for the various languages from which these works are translated.
A page devoted to the works of Philo of Alexandria or Philo Judaeus, the Jewish philosopher whose works were the intellectual foundation of the Christian school of Alexandria.
Two new pages devoted to Christian writings in Coptic and Syriac, and the distinctive Christian cultures that formed in those traditions.
We have no serious complaints about X10 Hosting, which has carried this site at no charge for two years now. The service has been almost as reliable as paid hosting, and the server performance for a simple HTML site like this has been more than adequate.
A few days ago some catastrophe happened to the X10 servers that put them off line for quite a while. We took this as an opportunity to look for an even more reliable service. One of the advantages of a pure HTML site is that it is completely portable: moving it is simply a matter of copying the files to a new server. We chose Neocities, an open-source project that tries to recreate the Geocities ecosystem from the early days of the Internet. The Library is a good fit for Neocities’ minimalist hosting, and Neocities gives it a secure connection (which makes it harder for the forces of evil to learn that you are looking for information on Vulgar Latin word formation) and a very stable server.
We also took this opportunity to revise the look of the site subtly. Less visibly, we revised the style sheet to make it more efficient, so that the whole look of this site is now controlled by about half a kilobyte of CSS. Except for loading a font to make the title page more titly, this site is about as efficient as it can be made. Your metered connection will not run down here.
Assuming that the server problem is sorted out, the Library will continue to exist at bolilibrary.x10host.com, and for at least the near future will be kept up to date there. But its primary home will be at Neocities from now on.
We have a new page of the Church Fathers and other early Christian writers arranged alphabetically.
The entire Eclectic Library site began with a single page of links to Google Books copies of the Church Fathers in the Schaff editions. (We now have a page of those same editions in better scans from the Internet Archive.) That was many years and several servers ago. Over time we have gradually accumulated many other editions of the Fathers and other early Christian writers, until the whole collection became unwieldy, and it was very difficult to round up all the works of even a well-known writer like Augustine.
It was time for an improvement in our organization.
This new alphabetical arrangement should make it easy to find any early Christian writer you wish to find. Since “Church Fathers” is by far the most common term people use when looking for most of these writers, we continue to use that name. It is, however, an expansive definition of “Church Fathers”; it includes some Mothers as well, and some heretics, and some non-Chalcedonian Christians (whom you may choose to call heretics if you like), and some minor writers who generally don’t make it to the list of “Fathers of the Church.” In short, for the minor writers, we have followed our usual principle of including anything that interests us; but we have tried to be comprehensive in collecting all the major Church Fathers.
Almost all these works are in English translations. A minority are in French translations where no English one was readily available, and we have included a few editions in the original languages as well.
As usual, we have made this change without breaking any links. The various other pages on which we collected these texts are still live.