Athena: Classical Mythology on CD‐ROM is a brief and unprepossessing introduction to Greek and Roman mythology. The CD contains summaries of over 1,200 myths with profiles of the major characters, family trees, illustrations from classical art, and full‐text translations of works by Ovid, Virgil, Livy, Homer, Hesiod and others as supporting documents. Folio PreViews is used to access this database. The software will work on Windows, DOS, or Macintosh platforms. The installation for DOS and Windows was very smooth. Installation on a Macintosh was not attempted. The DOS version, however, does not allow access to the images in the database without extra drivers.
While including extensive information, Athena has several drawbacks. Produced in 1995, the product is rather dry for today’s market with users accustomed to full color multimedia video and audio products. There are images attached to some of the myths and character profiles in Athena. These images, however, are in black and white and are often line drawings of famous artworks rather than photographic images of the originals. Given the nature of the topic, it is understandable that there are no audio or multimedia video components; but the images provided could be in color and of better quality.
There are two major paths of entry into Athena. The first is via a hyperlinked index of characters. The presence of this index is not clearly stated on the entry page, however, which contains only an unlabelled hyperlinked alphabet leading to the index and the Athena logo. The index, also called the directory, is detailed and extensively cross‐referenced. Personal names which have variants, e.g. Heracles and Hercules, are cross‐referenced as are place name variants, e.g. Ilium and Troy. Cross‐referencing seems to generally lead to the Greek form of names unless an alternative form is clearly the more common. Hercules refers back to Heracles; but Eumenides refers to Furies. Characters known best as a couple or group, e.g. the Muses, the Gorgons, Pyramus and Thisbe, are cross‐referenced to the group or the couple.
Users may also enter the product by clicking on the logo. This will lead to an introductory page which very briefly describes the contents of the product and how to navigate within it. Another alphabet linked to the index appears at the top and bottom of this page. It is interesting to note that this introductory page is also the help page. The first three options in the help menu lead to a pop‐up version without the index links. The third leads to the infobase introductory page itself. This information is taken, almost verbatim, from the accompanying print documentation.
Experienced users may also enter the infobase by doing a query. An explanation of the query function is given in the introduction screen accessed via the logo or help menu. The explanation, however, is very brief and states that search terms may be connected with AND, OR, and NOT but does not give any explanation of how those terms work. Inexperienced users are likely to find the query function difficult to use without assistance.
Experienced users may also use the table of contents feature to find materials. This is particularly helpful when searching for a translation. While the instructions given for using this option are more extensive than those given for other functions, they are still very brief and may cause more confusion than clarity for inexperienced searchers.
The user may select portions of the various texts to either print or save to file. Multiple selections may be chosen by tagging the desired paragraphs and then printing or saving when all desired sections have been marked. However, important data are left out of this tagging process. Tagged paragraphs (users may tag entire paragraphs only) print in the order tagged and include the paragraph number but no indication of the text from which the paragraph came. As paragraph numbers are reused among the different works, this could prove to be very confusing when dealing with portions of several texts at once.
The contents of the database are quite extensive. Summaries and full‐text translations are given for 20 works covering 800 years of classical literature. Nearly 150 images are included. The summaries, character profiles, index, translations, images, and family trees are well linked and, once an entry to the desired topic is found, it is very easy to move between the linked pieces.
This product could be very powerful in the hands of an experienced user. However, it seems to be designed for experienced users without thought for the learning curve of inexperienced users. The documentation for this product is poor and seems to assume that the user has used Folio PreViews or Folio BoundViews previously. The design also seems to assume that all users will be experienced in searching and will need minimal help. While the printed instructions contain more information than the on‐screen introduction, they are still very minimal and terse.
This would be a good supplementary product for undergraduate students of classical literature or civilisation if the students have the patience to become familiar with the interface. This product is a bit basic for graduate students as all the texts are available in translation but not in the original languages. I would not recommend it as a primary reference source.
