Diogenes is a tool for searching and browsing the databases of ancient texts, primarily in Latin and Greek, that are published by the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae and the Packard Humanities Institute. (NB. These databases are not distributed with Diogenes and must be obtained separately.)
Latest News
Request for Feedback. If you are using Diogenes outside of a university setting, such as in a primary or secondary school, or for private study, it would be very helpful if you could drop me a brief note to let me know how and why you have found it to be useful. Thanks!
Note on Mountain Lion It has been reported for Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion 10.8 that the default settings will not allow you to run an "untrusted" application like Diogenes which has been downloaded from the Internet rather than from the Apple Store. Simply control-click on the application when you run it for the first time, or go to System Preferences > Security & Privacy > General and change the setting for "Allow Applications Downloaded From" to "Anywhere".
Note on Lion. Diogenes does work with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, but some users (including me) have come across an intermittent problem. Sometimes, when switching from another application, Diogenes appears in the Menubar at the top of the screen, but the window disappears. I have found that either clicking on the "About Diogenes" menu item, or viewing all windows of the current application (which can be configured as a keystroke or "hot corner" action in Mission Control) will bring back the missing window. I am also experiencing this problem with another application (Aquamacs), so my instinct is that it is a Lion bug, which I hope will be fixed in due course. It's just a mild annoyance and it certainly does not make Diogenes unusable on Lion.
Version 3.1. The latest version of Diogenes includes Perseus morphological data and the LSJ and Lewis-Short dictionaries. Jump from text to dictionary, clicking on a word to get its definition; and jump from dictionary to text, clicking on a citation to view its context. You can also now do morphologically aware searches: search for all of the inflected forms of a given verb.
Version 3 of Diogenes has a graphical user interface based on Firefox. It should be very easy to install, much more so than in the past.
Bob Kaster has written a nice beginners guide for the latest version of Diogenes (note that it doesn't cover installation and it is written for an internal audience at Princeton, so some aspects are not relevant to the general public). (Traduccion Español)
Advantages of Using Diogenes
The goal of this software package is to provide a free, transparent and flexible interface to the classical databases on CD-Rom in the PHI format, which include the TLG, the PHI corpus of Latin texts up to AD 200, the Duke Documentary Papyri collection, and the PHI-sponsored corpora of ancient inscriptions.
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Diogenes is completely free.
It is available at no cost, and the source code is available for inspection and modification under the terms of the GNU General Public license. It is a tool written by a scholar for scholars.
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Diogenes is easy to install.
Earlier versions of Diogenes required some technical skill to install, but no longer. Native packages provide one-click install for Windows, Mac and Linux.
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Diogenes has many features.
Diogenes has many features, such as linking all Greek and Latin words to the Perseus morphological analysis tools and dictionaries, and the ability to jump straight to the context of any search result or dictionary citation. For a longer list, see the list of features.
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Diogenes is easy to use.
A web browser provides a familiar and easy-to-use interface to the databases: search for a word or phrase, browse to a particular location in an ancient text, view texts in your browser, and cut and paste them to other applications.
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Diogenes is fast.
Provided that you are not using an antique computer and you are not running a search that turns up millions of hits, Diogenes should run quite briskly.
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Diogenes is powerful.
While the basic interface is quite simple, more complex searches are easily done: use spaces to delimit word-boundaries; limit your search to particular texts (for the TLG, you can limit by genre, date, etc.); search for the presence of two or more words in the same clause, sentence, paragraph or range of lines.
For advanced users, you can search for regular expressions (patterns of text), and there is a command-line tool as well as the web interface.
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Diogenes can run over a network.
If you have the license to use the databases in this way, Diogenes can be set up to provide access to users across a network, to any computer with a web browser. In a departmental context, this could significantly ease administration.
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Diogenes can run just about anywhere.
It is written in the highly portable programming language Perl, so in addition to the easy installers mentioned above, experts should have no trouble installing it on more exotic platforms, such as Solaris and FreeBSD.
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Diogenes can output Greek in many encodings.
By default, the web interface displays Greek as Unicode, but if you need compatibility with other encodings, such as WinGreek, GreekKeys, or LaTeX, you can output Greek in many of these different formats. See the list on this page.
Caveat
NB. This program is distributed in the hope that it may be useful, but with no guarantee that the data it produces are accurate. Diogenes has no connection whatever to the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae or the Packard Humanities Institute. The binary data format used by these databases was deduced by the author from observation; he had no access to its specifications, and he may therefore have completely misunderstood its design and implementation. Use this program at your own risk and confirm its results against those produced by other programs.
See this page for the license agreement and statement of lack of warranty.