The SUDA

The Suda is a 10th century Byzantine Greek historical encyclopedia of the ancient Mediterranean world, derived from the scholia to critical editions of canonical works and from compilations by yet earlier authors. As the Oxford Classical Dictionary notes, ``in spite of its contradictions and other ineptitudes, [the Suda] is of the highest importance, since it preserves (however imperfectly) much that is ultimately derived from the earliest or best authorities in ancient scholarship, and includes material from many departments of Greek learning and civilization. [HS96]''

The standard edition of the Suda was edited by Ada Adler and published in five volumes over the years 1928-1938 [Adl38]. It is organized alphabetically, with entries numbered by the pair (first letter, sequence number). For example, the entry (beta, 4) is headed by the Greek word $\beta\alpha\beta\alpha\iota$; its entry spans only 2 lines in the Adler edition. Some entries, such as the entry for Homer, are much longer.

The full text of the Suda was entered into a 7.3MB computer file by The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG). The TLG is an electronic data bank of all extant ancient Greek literature from Homer (8th century BCE) to 600 CE with historiographical, lexicographical and scholiastic texts from the period between 600 and 1453 CE. The TLG project is located at the University of California, Irvine and can be reached via http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~tlg/index.html. The Greek text is encoded in Beta code, which is an Ascii markup that contains alphabetic notations (for instance, a denotes $\alpha$) along with codes for switching between Greek and Roman fonts, punctuation, and formatting. Unfortunately, the collection of data is not perfectly uniform; minor imperfections exist in the TLG's text as well as in the original Adler edition.