The Athenians Project is the lifeblood of Professor Emeritus John Traill, a world-renowned expert and instructor in "
Latin and
Greek Scientific Terminology" at the University of Toronto. He has published 24 books and edited an additional 5 books on Greek inscriptions, the topography of Athens and Attica, and on the people of ancient Athens. For the last 3 decades he has directed the Athenians Project. At the beginning of the 1980s, Traill, with the support of the University of Toronto, applied for and received a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada research grant to use relational database software technology to store the ancient Athenian data. During the next 30 years, over 100,000 entries have been entered as ancient Greek characters and stored using an
Empress Embedded Database. John Traill's project had its origin in the work of Benjamin Dean Meritt to maintain current data on Athenian prosopography. Like Traill, Meritt saw the potential of the computer to make his paper resources at the Institute for Advanced Study dynamic and expandable. By 1972 Traill was at work entering data. Meritt was an emeritus professor of Greek
epigraphy at the
Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Based on the Meritt card-file at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, "Persons of Ancient Athens" also includes full references with texts to document each biographical fact. Based originally at
Victoria University in the University of Toronto, formerly Victoria College, Athenians Project is now located in the Department of Classics at the University of Toronto. == References ==