Classical — The Classicist

The Classicist — Greek and Latin letters read whole, Homer to the late grammarians.

The Greco-Roman literary lane: the Perseus canons and First1KGreek, Diorisis, LSJ and Lewis & Short, the grc/lat treebanks, and the Vulgate wearing its Latin-literature hat beside its scripture one.

New here? The Quickstart sets up the library in minutes.

The shelves

A source wears every desk it serves — these 28 answer this desk. Holdings are read live from the catalog and dated; a shelf with nothing synced yet says so.

Languages on this desk (live doc-or-entry counts as of 7 November 2026): grc 122,400 · lat 59,790 · gmy 5,890 · eng 4,335 · lab 787 · grc-Latn 510 · deu 225 · en 27 · ecy-Latn 22 · gmh 11 … and 5 more (nabu axis classical lists all).

Carried in by multilingual packs (ud — whole-source members whose other languages ride along, as of 7 November 2026): orv 9 · ota 5 · lzh 4 · egy 3 · frm 3 … and 15 more (nabu axis classical lists all).

The desk’s instruments

• Gold-lemma languages: grc and lat — the Perseus canons, First1KGreek, Diorisis, and the grc/lat PROIEL and UD treebanks. search --lemma, vocab, formulas and cognates are all at their richest here.
• Dictionaries: LSJ and Lewis & Short, both on the lexica shelf (nabu define μῆνις, nabu define virtus).
• Alignment works: nt (Greek NT, Vulgate, SBLGNT) and — through the LXX and the Vulgate — ot and psalms. The Classicist owns both LXX-side witnesses.
• The meter layer: 167,732 scanned verse lines ride the catalog as enrichments — Latin from Pedecerto’s scansions, Greek from Hypotactic — so search --meter H filters hits to hexameters (codes: H hexameter, D distich, and the scanner’s full repertoire), and a scanned line’s nabu show carries its meter. Iliad 1.1 knows it is a hexameter.

Working the classical desk

The generic desk surfaces — every desk answers to these, in working order (enable once, sync, then query):

nabu enable classical               # first time: put this desk's shelves in this box's profile
nabu sync classical                 # fetch/refresh the desk's enabled members
nabu list --axis classical          # the shelf census, this desk only
nabu axis classical                 # the desk card: members, holdings, gold coverage
nabu search WORD --axis classical   # a query scoped to this desk's shelves

This desk’s own surfaces:

nabu align "MARK 2.3"                 # the parallel-witness card, Greek NT beside the Vulgate
nabu search --meter H --lang lat      # metrical browse — every scanned Latin hexameter, corpus order
nabu search vesper --meter H --lang lat  # a text query filtered to hexameters (Catullus 62 opens the hits)
nabu parallels urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0012.tlg001.perseus-grc2:1.1  # intertext and reception off Iliad 1.1
nabu vocab urn:nabu:proiel:cic-off    # distinctive vocabulary of Cicero, De officiis
nabu formulas urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0012.tlg001.perseus-grc2  # Homer's repeated formulas, ranked by count x length
nabu search λόγος --near θεός --window 5 --lang grc  # collocation search, lemma- and elision-aware
nabu define μῆνις                     # LSJ and Lewis & Short on the lexica shelf

Ask your model

With the MCP server connected, this desk answers conversational research questions. Each example ran live against this library:

• “Who quotes the opening of the Iliad?” → nabu_parallels urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0012.tlg001.perseus-grc2:1.1 — The reception of μῆνιν ἄειδε across the library: Galen (De placitis), Aristotle’s Ars Rhetorica, Sextus Empiricus (seven loci), Dio Chrysostom, a metrical handbook — each hit with the shared folded phrase as evidence and a urn to open.
• “What does LSJ say about this word, with citations I can open?” → nabu_define λόγος (lang: grc) — The LSJ entry with senses as structured text; citations of works this library holds carry resolved passage urns for nabu_show.

Terminal setup

• Polytonic Greek (grc): nabu leaves it intact (a monotonic display mode is opt-in). Any font with polytonic coverage works; for uniform metrics across Greek, IAST and Cyrillic, fill iTerm2’s non-ASCII slot with Noto Sans Mono at the same size as the ASCII font.
• Latin (lat): nothing special — the terminal’s default font suffices.

The full guidance, per script, is on the display page.

One of the 30 research desks; the flat shelf map is The Library and the reasoning is docs/axes.md.