Bellerophon transforms your mild-mannered iPhone or iPad into a bastion of scholarship. Browse a compendious library comprising thousands of texts ranging from Homer to Ammianus Marcellinus to Beowulf and spanning millennia, compare multiple works side-by-side, add your own notes and bookmarks for quick reference, view morphological analyses for Greek and Latin texts, and more!
Bellerophon includes the following features:
* Over 3,500 texts in 10 languages included, with no internet access needed!
* Includes texts ranging from canonical classical works to lesser-known authors like Quintus Smyrnaeus and Anna Komnena, to works outside the traditional sphere of classics such as Beowulf, ancient Jewish and biblical texts, and much more! Most texts are in the original language, but the collection also includes over 900 translations into English, as well as some surprising versions of familiar works (such as Aristotle's Poetics in Arabic).
* For Greek and Latin, you can request morphological analyses from the Perseus Digital Library by double-tapping on a word (note that this does require an internet connection).
* Quickly navigate any text via a hierarchical table of contents, add your own bookmarks for even faster reference to specific sections, or just jump straight to a particular passage by entering it in citation form.
* Search the full text of any document, matching on a specific word or substring, and page through results.
* Open multiple windows side-by-side in the same session: you can compare the different passages of the same text, view the original alongside a translation, or juxtapose entirely separate texts.
* Add your own notes to record new vocabulary or whatever else you like. Additionally, many texts include the contents of footnotes originally present in the printed editions, ranging from apparatus criticus entries to helpful background information.
I’ve been studying Greek and Latin for 25 years. Early on Perseus became available, which was amazing, but Bellerophon is even more amazing. It’s a VAST repository of G/L texts, including by many authors I’ve never even heard of. Classic authors, Church fathers, obscure geographers and philosophers—they’re in here. The more common texts have English translations, so you can split the screen and do a Loeb-like side-by-side comparison. Even 25 years in, I still struggle with these languages, but having a vast repository of texts with translations gives a lot of material to play with. Also, you can pull up a quick morphological analysis if stuck on a word. My only complaints are minor. It would be nice if it could automatically find the English text (if present) and give you a one-click way to get it into split-screen. Also, to get the morphology requires a double-tap plus finding and selecting an option from a larger menu. It’d be nice if a long-tap on a word would pop up the analysis. Otherwise, wow, well done.
Incredible! The wished for app
DittyDittyBangBang
I am so grateful to the developer of this app. It is incredibly powerful and well designed for the reading of Latin and Greek. I look forward to using it to dive back into texts I have long avoided, newly confident that this app is going to ease the process of mastering them very significantly. Thank you thank you
Fantastic App - In Need of a Couple Tweaks
thomasmore44
I use this app nearly every day in my phone and my iPad. It’s lightning fast and allows me to read for pleasure, or hone in on a particular word or phrase in a given text. As another reviewer said, it’s great for reading and research. There are so few typos (and some have been corrected already in the big authors like Seneca or Plato), so I’m confident I can read for pleasure and have never hit a confusing sentence that wasn’t just my fault! I’d like to see two things to improve this app. First, the Latin dictionary will tell me the form but not the meaning. I get both in Greek when I highlight a word and press “Analyze” in the menu that pops up. All I get in Latin when I do the same is the form. Having the dictionary built right in is clutch! And so the app is only halfway there. I’d also like to see a Mac version, or at least a good way to export highlights. I found myself highlighting at first, and I still will for certain authors when I know I’ll come back to the app. But since the highlights can’t easily be moved or synced (to my knowledge), they feel kind of locked in and so I find myself highlighting less. Even just a text export would help me move it to a spreadsheet or something more permanent. Thanks for developing this fantastic app and making it free! I hope it just continues to get better and the corpus keeps growing! I’s love to see more Late Antiquity/Patristic authors. I read some Cyprian of Carthage but no Gregory the Great, for example.
Beautiful
Brian W. Davidson
Adrian has created yet another beautiful, functional, amazingly free app. I can’t believe how many texts are included and how much you can do with this 1.0 release. Just download it and start playing around! Also check out Protagoras for lexica.
The developer, Adrian Packel, has not provided details about its privacy practices and handling of data to Apple. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
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Information
Seller
Adrian Packel
Size
503.1 MB
Category
Reference
Compatibility
Requires iOS 13.4 or later.
iPhone Requires iOS 13.4 or later.
iPad Requires iPadOS 13.4 or later.
iPod touch Requires iOS 13.4 or later.
Mac Requires macOS 11.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later.