The authors of this paper, along with various colleagues and student assistants, have been working to create an online, open access database that presents and analyzes the metrical patterns of Greek drama, beginning with Euripides.

We begin with XML versions of each play’s Greek text and translation, drawn from perseus.tufts.edu. The Greek text is adjusted manually to match the scansion of Euripidean lyrics in Frederico Lourenço’s The Lyric Metres of Euripidean Drama. By means of a Python program that builds on James Tauber’s Greek accentuation library and Anna Conser’s Greek scansion program, each syllable of the play is identified and tagged as long or short. Manual corrections are made as necessary. Additional tags are added indicating speaker changes, meters, and basic divisions of the play.

The adjusted XML file is then incorporated into our online database, which uses the web technologies HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to convert the XML data into a more accessible form. The website presents the text of the plays with accompanying scansion, displays metrical patterns in ways easy to comprehend, and allows one to see numerous statistical features of the tragedian’s use of meter. We use HTML and CSS to set the website’s structure and style and JavaScript to manage the website’s interactive and statistical functions. JSON files organize additional information about the play, enabling visualization of the play’s dramatic structure, statistical analysis based on character attributes like gender and status, and the display of English translations alongside the Greek text.

The database thus allows a user to see the scansion of each verse, as well as to find easily meters, types of meter, and metrical patterns, and to discover such features as the distribution of meters by individual character and by characters’ gender, status, and ethnicity.