The Perseus Collections will be released from Logos on September 30, 2011. If you pre-order them, you get them free.
You read that right – free if you pre-order.
Tony Reinke writes:
The collection is a library in itself of over 1,100 ancient Greek and Latin titles and includes many corresponding English translations and helpful commentaries. Authors include Aristotle, Cicero, Homer, Plato, Plutarch, Sophocles, Demosthenes, and many others.
The release of this massive collection is significant step for New Testament studies since many of the Greek titles are referenced in technical Greek reference works and lexicons like TDNT, BDAG, and EDNT. The folks at Logos have announced on their website that over time they plan to add lemma tags to all the Greek books and add hyperlinks to the lexical reference to correspond to the original books in the Perseus Classics Collection. So when you see a reference in TDNT to, say, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, the reference will be hyperlinked and a click will land you in Aristotle’s work to read the context for yourself.
Skilled Greek exegetes will benefit from the collection because of the tags and hyperlinks, but what about those who want to engage the classic Greek works on a less technical level? Most of the books are available as English translations. With these English translations the collection is quite accessible to all readers and offers many key books that can help sharpen your communication skills.
I downloaded Perseus classics and the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri. I’m still amazed this stuff was free!
Thanks to Logos for serving us in these ways. You can pick the ones you want to pre-order here.
Clarification: I’ve just heard from Logos that they’ve decided this material will always be free, so even if you don’t pre-order it, the price won’t change.
Lots of info here.
Dr. Hamilton,
If you feel so inclined, please check out the reviews on my blog of the Classics set. I like you thank Logos for what they do for the Kingdom of Christ.
Cliff
As you note, the resources will always be free. The reason to pre-order is to get them sooner rather than later. Logos realizes that releasing this many resources at once will put a strain on their servers, so they are going to stage the releases and once they start releasing, no one will be able to order the resources until all the pre-pub people have been served. When the resources come out of pre-pub on the 30th, you won’t be able to find Perseus on the website. It will not be available to order. That will be the case until pre-pub orders have been filled. At that time, it will be available via the web once more.