Brill’s Jacoby Online is an important resource for Classical Studies and Ancient History. It comprises five separate works, based on the original multi-volume work by the German classicist, Felix Jacoby (1876-1959). The ‘Jacoby’ was a critical edition of over 800 Greek historians whose works had been lost, but were preserved incompletely in fragments. Jacoby collected, annotated and commented on the fragments, but was unable to complete the huge project in his lifetime.
The five components of Jacoby Online are:
- Felix Jacoby’s original multi-volume work, Die Fragmente der Griechischen Historiker: Parts I-III.
- Brill’s New Jacoby (BNJ): a revised English edition of the above.
- Brill’s New Jacoby – Second Edition (BNJ2): a revised and enlarged edition of Brill’s New Jacoby.
- Die Fragmente der Griechischen Historiker Part IV: Biography and Antiquarian Literature: a continuation of Felix Jacoby’s work, adding many new historians and texts.
- Die Fragmente der Griechischen Historiker Part V: Geography (FGrH V), a continuation of Felix Jacoby’s work, adding many new historians and texts.
It includes expert critical commentaries on the texts and fragments, together with brief biographies of all the historians. The project is still ongoing, and Jacoby Online is updated twice a year: the latest updates have added 1.2 million words.
You can browse each of the five component works by historian name, historian number or publication date, and you can search for words or phrases, or historians. You can search any of the five component works individually, or across all of them at once. Greek original texts and translations are included, and you can search in English or Ancient Greek.
More detailed help is available on the database.