Guide · Getting started
How to use the reader
No background in the classics and no confidence in the languages are required. Start from any passage that catches your eye. These four steps are all you need.
1. Find a work
From “Browse” in the top bar you reach the author index. Search by author, title or topic, and filter by source language (Greek or Latin) or genre. An author’s page lists their works with a short summary of each.
2. Read in parallel
The source and translation run sentence by sentence. Click a difficult word to open the dictionary (gloss and parsing). Grammar and usage notes appear as numbered footnotes below the parallel text. Hovering a translated sentence highlights the matching source (the alignment is AI-generated across the whole text and is not guaranteed to be perfectly accurate). Switch the display language between Japanese, English, Chinese and Korean from “Language” in the top bar.
3. Join the conversation
Reading needs no account. To take part in the conversation, sign in with a Google account from the top bar (your first sign-in asks you to agree to the data-handling notice). On any sentence you can leave a question, an observation, or an alternative rendering. For a new comment, choose at least one tag for its kind (translation, interpretation, context, intertext, grammar, annotation, …). Your comment is translated by the model into all four languages, so readers in every language can follow it. Replies build into threads, and you can “like” others’ comments. Each comment has a citable link (🔗) so it can be referenced individually, e.g. from a paper. Posts that breach the community guidelines may be hidden or removed (see the Terms of Use).
4. Read offline (PDF)
From a work’s page you can export the whole work, or a chosen range of sections, as a PDF — handy for reading on the move or in print.
5. Found an error? (reporting)
If the original (Greek/Latin) text looks wrong, click the sentence and use “⚑ Report an error.” Reporting requires sign-in (it is recorded under your name, and an adopted report earns points on your profile — a sizeable +10). Please report only clear, objective errors — such as a transcription mistake in the source text (for the wording or interpretation of the translation, use the comments, not a report). Each report shows its status (open / in progress / resolved) in that sentence’s panel, and others who notice the same issue can back it with “♥ Same issue.” Once fixed, it appears in the changelog.
6. Contributions & notifications
Your reports and comments are recorded on your profile as contributions (fixes adopted, reports, comments, likes received) with badges and a score, while the community’s progress is gathered on the Community page. When signed in, the bell in the header notifies you when a report is fixed or your comment gets a reply or like; you can toggle each kind under “Notifications” on your profile.