Perseus Digital Library

04/28/2026

There are a number of exciting new development to discuss at Perseus! To begin with, a long planned move of the Scaife Viewer to the Tufts IT infrastructure has finally occurred.

Many of our long term Perseus Digital Library 4.0 (P4) users have requested that the morphology and dictionary tools available in P4 also be implemented in the Scaife Viewer.

Another common request has been the addition of more reference works found in P4 such as commentaries on individual authors (e.g. Cicero, Sophocles, Homer), which form an integral part of the P4 reading environment. We are happy to announce that the first steps towards both of these requested features have been taken and are now available for use on the Scaife Viewer. To read more, please visit our blog: (https://sites.tufts.edu/perseusupdates/2026/04/27/updates-to-the-scaife-viewer-dictionaries-commentaries-and-a-preliminary-interface-redesign/)

04/09/2026

April 8 Update:

Perseus access has been restored. We will continue to monitor the traffic and post further updates as necessary.

04/08/2026

Perseus 4.0 Outage

As of April 7, 2026, malicious traffic has interrupted service on Perseus 4.0 and related sites.

The Scaife Viewer remains online at this writing.

We will update when we have further information

02/23/2026

As many of our users are aware and have reported, the Scaife Viewer (https://scaife.perseus.org/) text search has been down for several months. The problem was first documented in late November, and we apologize for any inconvenience and frustration this may have caused.

We are currently in the midst of a developer transition that has limited our ability to fully investigate and resolve this issue. Development work is also currently engaged in implementing and beta-testing the rollout of vocabulary tools within the Scaife viewer, a feature long requested by many.

We are aware of the problem this creates with making full use of the Scaife viewer and are actively working to resolve it as quickly as possible. We thank you for your patience.

The Scaife Viewer is a reading environment for pre-modern text collections in both their original languages and in translation. It is the first phase of work towards the next version of the Perseus Digital Library, Perseus 5.0.

01/07/2026

The Perseus Digital Library is pleased to announce funding from the NEH to create a new digital edition of Aristotle’s Poetics in Greek, Arabic and Latin. For more information, please go here (https://sites.tufts.edu/perseusupdates/2026/01/07/new-funding-from-the-neh-for-digital-edition-of-aristotles-poetics/)

12/15/2025

The Perseus Digital Library is excited to share that it has been selected for a 2025 Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI) award from Schmidt Sciences. Our project “Beyond Translation: Opening up the Human Record” seeks to transform how we engage with texts in ancient languages and across cultures. While LLMs can now offer translations of both modern and ancient languages, translation is only the beginning of how we engage with texts in ancient languages! For more information, please check out our blog (https://sites.tufts.edu/perseusupdates/)

10/16/2025

We have been working at Perseus on an initial release of a new browser for the Art and Archaeology collection. You can read more about it here (https://sites.tufts.edu/perseusupdates/2025/10/15/announcing-a-new-release-of-the-perseus-art-archaeology-artifact-aa-browser/)

03/17/2025

The 503 errors appear to have returned. We believe that this may be related to data capture for training models (such as AI LLMs). Unfortunately, there are so many bots at work trying to access our servers at the same time, this overwhelms our server nodes and makes it impossible to maintain service. Manual blocking of sets of IP addresses has been attempted, but, as soon as one set of addresses is blocked, the access will resume from different addresses, and so on. We are working on ways of addressing this and trying to stay ahead of the problem as the situation evolves. As always, thank you for your patience.

02/19/2025

The Perseus servers are currently being flooded with requests from overseas servers. The systems administrators are endeavoring to block the bad actors and maintain operations, but there may be disruptions until all of the relevant domains can be identified. We thank you for your patience.

Note that the Scaife Viewer is available:
https://scaife.perseus.org
With a Quick Start Guide here:
https://perseus.pubpub.org/pub/bv43kvmy/release/1

2,669 works in 3,776 editions and translations (1,941 in Greek and 631 in Latin) 83.8 million words (40.6 million in Greek, 16.4 million in Latin)

07/26/2024

For more on the current issues Perseus is having and our work to fix them, please visit our updates blog:

News and announcements from the Perseus Digital Library