Style Guide for Classical Studies

The Writing Proficiency (wp) credit designation carries certain requirements and expectations, including the following:

In writing proficiency courses, students learn the writing style and conventions of their disciplines, as well as the techniques for integrating evidence into scholarly papers.

Every academic discipline has its own writing style and conventions. English, for example, tends to follow the mla style, while History follows the Chicago or Turabian style, and Biology follows the cbe Manual. Different classical journals and associations use different styles: the main American association, the Society for Classical Studies (formerly the American Philological Association), publishes the Transactions of the American Philological Association (tapa) and with it the tapa Style Guide.

This course will follow, for the most part, the style and conventions of the tapa style; this document outlines important points of that style and gives a few other pointers on writing good academic prose. In some places, this guide will depart from the tapa style to avoid overwhelming students with pedantic details about formatting and exceptions to said pedantry: it matters little whether you abbreviate philology in journal titles as P or Ph. Instead, this guide aims to provide you familiarity with the general guidelines favored by most American classical studies journals today, so that you can, with minimal effort, tweak a paper to fit almost any journal style. Finally, the appendices give you a wealth of abbreviations that you may wish to use.

Contents

Document Formatting

These guidelines apply to the general layout and format of your paper.

When you submit a paper to a journal for publication, the editors will put your paper through scripts or programs to convert your text into the format that the journal uses internally. Journal editors lay out strict guidelines in their style guides, and they expect submissions to adhere to those guidelines so that their systems can process the articles with minimal intervention. An author's failure to comply with the published style guides may result in the delay or outright rejection of a submission.

Canvas, likewise, processes your papers and may change things when it displays the paper online.

Like a military uniform, submission guidelines do not guarantee that your submission will look good: they keep it from functioning poorly.

Page Setup and Margins

Use letter (8½ inches × 11 inches) sized paper in portrait layout (8½″ wide × 11″ tall), not A4 (as European journals do).

Use one inch margins on all four sides of the paper.

Do not bother with page numbering. Canvas may well reformat your paper and change the page numbers. When submitting a paper to a journal, the editors will take care of any page numbering.

Hyphenation

Do not turn on automatic hyphenation in your word processor. Do not split single words across two lines: if a full word will not fit on the end of one line, it belongs at the beginning of the next line.

Indentation

Indent the first line of each paragraph of your paper's body text ¼ inch or ½ from the left margin. Word defaults to ½ inch, while some other word processors to ¼ inch. The difference matters little. Indentation helps the reader quickly recognize paragraph boundaries without wasting lines between paragraphs.

If you interrupt a paragraph with a block quotation (usually a bad idea), continue the same paragraph after the block quotation without indenting to signal that you are continuing the same paragraph and not beginning a new paragraph. Only indent the first line of a new paragraph.

Justification

Turn off justification; text should be ragged right, also known as left-aligned or flush left.

In typography, justification means fudging the spacing between words so that each line of text comes out to the same length. Microsoft Word's lousy line-breaking algorithm ensures that fully justified text looks awful.

Body text should be ragged right or left-aligned or flush left: all lines of text should begin the same distance from the left side of the paper, but they will naturally end at different distances from the right side of the paper, making the right side of the paper look ragged. The reader's eye uses the different line lengths to track its vertical position on the page, so ragged right text is easier to read.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Proin id eros sollicitudin, molestie erat vulputate, elementum tortor. Morbi nisi enim, malesuada quis rutrum vel, pretium id quam. Maecenas molestie turpis vel gravida cursus. Pellentesque tincidunt at sem vel luctus. Maecenas tincidunt odio sit amet auctor egestas. Nullam mollis ut dolor a tincidunt. Pellentesque eleifend, lacus eu consectetur fermentum, nisl diam rutrum nunc, eu ullamcorper massa leo eu ipsum. Sed posuere felis et arcu facilisis, id dapibus enim auctor. Donec vitae dignissim mauris, sit amet tempor turpis. Nunc sed sem nisl. Nulla eu urna id justo fringilla suscipit a eu mauris. Suspendisse porttitor fringilla eros ac sollicitudin. Proin aliquam egestas metus nec gravida. Proin suscipit velit sed aliquam elementum. Phasellus lacinia urna ac diam ullamcorper fermentum.
Justified text: every line of text begins and ends at the same distance from the right and left side of the page as every other line. Spaces between words become uneven: in some lines they are longer than in others. Do not do this.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Curabitur mauris tortor, tincidunt a nisi sed, efficitur ornare ante. Cras sit amet elit enim. In ornare consequat vulputate. Nam vel nibh suscipit, condimentum nunc in, vestibulum nunc. Sed at lacus vitae nulla suscipit auctor. Integer egestas felis enim, sit amet malesuada mi finibus non. Etiam mollis placerat metus, eget sagittis dui tristique ac. Etiam eget elementum purus, feugiat molestie augue. Aenean tristique justo eget dictum porttitor. Pellentesque sapien ligula, imperdiet a feugiat vitae, eleifend eget dui. Curabitur pharetra ligula eget ligula semper, eu fringilla sapien volutpat. Donec dapibus non enim eu pretium. Donec tincidunt posuere dictum. Nam at molestie nibh.
Ragged right: the right side of the paragraph is uneven. That is a good thing.

Line Spacing

Double-space the body text of your paper. Footnotes and the bibliography may have single spacing, if you wish, but you must double-space the body of the paper. This makes the paper more readable for me and your fellow students, and the presentation time limits are based on the number of double-spaced pages. In general, one can read aloud one double-spaced page in two minutes.

Do not add extra space between paragraphs, between the header and the main body of your paper, or between the main body and the bibliography. Everything should flow one line after another without extra whitespace.

Typeface

Use only twelve-point Times or Times New Roman.

Do not use bold text anywhere. Do not underline anything.

Italicize titles of books and journals. Italicize foreign words when written in the Latin (English) alphabet.

Vergil knew Homer's Odyssey well.
Italicize Odyssey because it is the title of a book.
He wrote about philotimia.
(foreign, Latin alphabet—italicized)
He wrote about φιλοτιμία.
(Greek alphabet—not italicized)

If you do write in the Greek alphabet, use Unicode encoding rather than Beta Code. Nobody uses Beta Code today.

Document Header (Title and Author)

Your paper's header comprises your paper's title and your name.

Start your paper with your title on the first line, centered, in the same typeface and size as the rest of the paper.

Capitalize the first letter of any word in your title except articles (a, an, the), monosyllabic coordinating conjunctions (and, or, but), and monosyllabic prepositions (by, for, from, to, and so forth), and to in infinitives. Always capitalize nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs. Always capitalize the first word of the title and the first word after any colon or semicolon.

On the second line, centered immediately under the title, write your name.

Begin your first body paragraph on the next line. Do not write the date, my name, the course number, the section number, your id number, or any of that other nonsense. Only your paper's title and your name belong in the header.

Glorious Title: A Promise of a Magnificent Paper
John Q. Namegoeshere
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum…

Body Text Formatting

The body of your paper consists of double-spaced paragraphs set in 12 point Times or Times New Roman. Indent the first line of each pargraph ¼ inch or ½ inch; add no whitespace between paragraphs.

Do not break up the body text with section headers. Section headers aid in the navigation of papers longer than ten pages, but shorter papers (like yours) should flow naturally without the need for such navigational aids.

Bibliography

The bibliography follows directly after the end of the body of your paper, neither on a new page nor with extra whitespace to separate it from the body text. Give it a header, Bibliography, centered in the same 12 point Times or Times New Roman as the rest of the paper. Bibliographic entries should follow in 12 point Times or Times New Roman with a hanging indentation (the first line is flush left, while all subsequent lines are indented) of ½ inch (36 points). In Word, you can set that in the Format menu:

Format > Paragraph > Indents and Spacing > Indentation > Special: Hanging by 0.5″

If you use Apple's Pages, you'll find this in the Style Options pane on the right-hand side of the window: click the Layout tab and, under Indents, set the first to 0″ and Left to 0.5″. It is best to save this as a new Paragraph Style so that you can apply it easily to all the bibliographic entries.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
Bibliography
  • Anderson, C. 2008. "Archilochus, his Lost Shield, and the Heroic Ideal." Phoenix 62: 255–60.
  • Braund, S. 1998. "Praise and Protreptic in Early Imperial Panegyric: Cicero, Seneca, Pliny." In Whitby, M. ed. The Propaganda of Power: The Role of Panegyric in Late Antiquity. Leiden: Brill. 53–76.

General Notes on Style

As you write, remember that you are writing for a broad and diverse audience. Avoid jargon and complexity. Follow the grammatical and syntactic rules of standard American English. Ask yourself whether your parents or grandparents would understand your paper: if not, you should rewrite your paper until you think they would easily grasp what you mean.

Contractions

Avoid contractions. Write he has, not he's; do not instead of don't; it is for it's (not to be confused with its); and so forth.

Eras

Many American journals (including tapa) now require authors to write ce (Common Era) and bce (Before Common Era) instead of the traditional ad (Anno Domini) and bc (Before Christ). For our purposes, feel free to use either system, but remain consistent: do not switch systems in the middle of a paper.

The bce and ce abbreviations follow the year:

753 bce, 33 ce

In the traditional system, bc follows the year, but ad always precedes the year:

753 bc, ad 33

The following table illustrates the two systems in use.

Traditional System Common Era System
123 bc 123 bce
ad 2017 2017 ce

Hyphens and Dashes

A hyphen (-) joins two words or morphemes to make one word: Greco-Roman. The hyphen key (between the zero and the equals sign) on the keyboard produces a hyphen.

An en dash (–) separates the endpoints of a numeric range: “106–43 bc.” On a Mac, ⌥- (option + hyphen) produces an en dash. In Word on Windows, typing a hyphen between numbers should trigger autocorrect to replace the hyphen with an en dash. The en dash gets its name from being the width of one n character.

An em dash (—) interrupts a sentence: Cicero loved soccer—but that is beside the point. On a Mac, ⇧⌥- (shift + option + hyphen) produces an em dash. In Word on Windows, typing two hyphens should produce an em dash. The em dash gets its name from being the width of one m character.

Whitespace neither precedes nor follows any of these marks. You can use all three in the same sentence:

Cicero—who lived 106–43 bce—invented the game of Greco-Roman soccer.
The first and third dashes, between Cicero and who and between bce and invented, are em dashes (—) that separate the interruption who lived 106–43bce from the rest of the sentence. Between 106 and 43 is an en dash (–) indicating a numeric range. Between Greco and Roman is a hyphen (-) that makes Greco-Roman a compound word.

Literary Present and Historical Past Tenses

When referring to things that happen inside primary source texts, use the present tense. This is called the "literary present tense." Use the past tense for referring to things that happened in the past but not inside primary source texts. Discuss authors' lives and history in the past tense but characters in books or poems in the present.

In the final lines of the Æneid, Æneas stabs Turnus to death.
Æneas is a literary character in a book, so we talk about him in the literary present tense.
On the Ides of March, 44 bc, a group of senators stabbed Julius Cæsar to death.
Here we discuss Julius Cæsar as a historical figure and thus in the past tense.

Numbers

Do not use Roman numerals. Even in citations, use Arabic numerals for all numbers:

Cic. Rep. 1.26.

In body text, write out as words any number that can be represented as a single word:

one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty

Use Arabic numerals for any number longer than one word (but see the following for exceptions):

21 (not twenty-one), 22 (not twenty-two), 99 (not ninety-nine)

Write out the names of decades and centuries:

The twenty-first century was a time of despair for the Romans.
In the sixties and seventies, classicists wrote on typewriters instead of laptops.

Write out as a word any number that begins a sentence:

Augustus had 99 problems, but Ovid had no place among them.
Ninety-nine problems beset Augustus, but Ovid had no place among them.

Use a comma to separate the hundreds and thousands places in numbers that are not years or page numbers. Do not use commas in writing years or page numbers, however:

I received 1,776 pieces of coal for Christmas.
The world began in 1776 ce.

Numeric Ranges

When writing numeric ranges like page numbers, follow these rules:

  1. Always write the ones and tens digit (note: the real tapa rules are a bit more complex).
  2. Only write the hundreds digit of the ending number if it differs from the hundreds digit of the beginning number. Do not write the hundreds digit of the ending number if it is the same as the hundreds digit of the beginning number.
from 110 to 220: 110–220
from 110 to 120: 110–20 (not 110–120)
from 110 to 115: 110–15 (not 110–5 nor 110–115)

Quotation and Block Quotation

Quotation (up to three lines)

If you are quoting up to three lines of text, place them in double quotation marks (words). Commas, question marks, exclamation marks, and periods come before (inside) quotation marks, but colons and semicolons go after (outside) them.

Parenthetical citations belong in the same sentence as the quote they describe. If a parenthetical citation follows the quotation, do not put the final period of the quotation inside the quotation marks: close the quotation marks, write the parenthetical citation, and put the period after the closing parenthesis.

Quintus Smyrnaeus 10.417 remarks on Priam's deafness to Creusa: So wailed she; but the King heard naught thereof.
Periods should come before quotation marks.
So wailed she; but the King heard naught thereof (Quint. Smyrn. 10.417).
Note that the period is after the parenthetical citation, not at the end of the quotation.

Block Quotation (four or more lines)

You should avoid block quotation: paraphrase instead. Copying four or more lines of text into your paper wastes space that you should dedicate instead to your own arguments.

If you absolutely have to use a block quotation (and you should not), do not use quotation marks. Set the text on a new line, and indent the entire quotation ½ inch from the left margin. Because a block quotation is a separate stream of text interrupting the normal flow of sentences in a paragraph, and that separate stream is understood as one unit, the final period of the quotation may precede the parenthetical citation. For the same reason, the first line of prose inserted as a block quotation is not indented any further than the rest of the quotation.

Curabitur non quam pharetra, sagittis nisl ac, tincidunt ex. Mauris accumsan interdum vulputate. Integer ut justo pretium, dictum ligula nec, mattis felis. Nulla tempor nisl ut pulvinar pulvinar. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Maecenas sit amet nunc non urna egestas pellentesque vitae vitae velit. Pellentesque erat libero, ullamcorper vitae magna eget, pulvinar condimentum ante.

Sed id mauris ac arcu varius fringilla ut id ipsum. Aenean non justo quis tellus fermentum laoreet. Donec sit amet ex sit amet nisi consequat pretium. Aenean scelerisque volutpat pellentesque. Mauris pharetra eros eu sollicitudin suscipit. Cras sit amet hendrerit odio. Sed tincidunt id velit et dignissim. (Blabber 2018: 128)

Phasellus at hendrerit libero. Praesent nec ligula nec elit luctus accumsan vel in augue. Sed quis maximus elit. Pellentesque vel tincidunt justo, in tempor dui. Quisque egestas interdum lorem, in feugiat elit sollicitudin non. Mauris sodales commodo tortor, eu fringilla orci imperdiet eget. Etiam id felis in dui accumsan pulvinar vitae vitae elit. Donec luctus justo ac leo pharetra, id eleifend magna pharetra. Donec urna turpis, vestibulum id elit a, ultrices suscipit lacus.

Verse

When quoting up to three lines of verse, quote them in double quotation marks as you would prose, but separate the verses with a forward slash.

Lesbia, you ask how many kisses of yours / would be enough and more to satisfy me (Catull. 7.1–2).

When quoting more than three lines of verse, paraphrase if possible. If you absolutely must quote more than three lines of verse, set the lines as a block quotation and put each verse on its own line.

…let her not look for
my love as before,
she whose crime destroyed it, like the last
flower of the field, touched once
by the passing plough. (Catull. 11.21–24)

Reference and Citation

When writing an academic paper within classical studies, you must back up your arguments with primary source material and situate your arguments among those current in scholarship. To do so, you must cite primary and secondary sources.

Types of Sources

Primary sources are ancient texts (speeches, histories, dialogues, plays, verses, novels, inscriptions, etc.). They were written in Latin and ancient Greek by ancient Romans and ancient Greeks who lived in ancient antiquity and have been dead for a very long time now.

Secondary sources are modern scholarly works (articles, chapters, and monographs) written by modern scholars about ancient texts and the ancient world. Secondary sources interpret primary sources. You want to use recently written secondary sources so that you take the current state of scholarship into consideration: a paper full of references to books written in the seventies will come across as stale and out of touch with modern academic thought. The authors of your secondary sources should still be alive: try to stick to the twenty-first century as much as possible.

Secondary sources should also be peer-reviewed. In the peer-review process, an editor for a publishing house or journal assigns the scholar's book or chapter or article to reviewers knowledgable in the field. These reviewers check to make sure that the scholarship is reasonable and well-supported by primary and recent, relevant secondary material. Peer-review weeds out the wacky conspiracy theorists, Atlantis fanatics, and so forth.

Tertiary sources are compiled from primary and secondary sources. Timelines, dictionaries, encyclopedia entries, and handbooks are tertiary sources. You would not cite a tertiary source in a paper, since such sources do not provide an in-depth examination of any subject. Tertiary sources help you quickly gain the "big picture" of a subject early on in your research; they give you ideas of directions that your investigations into secondary sources might take.

Wikipedia and blogs are not valid sources. Do not refer to them in your paper. Neither is peer-reviewed.

When writing a research paper in classics, you write about primary sources by making arguments that also build upon or refute secondary sources. For example, you might write a paper about Vergil’s Æneid (a primary source). In that paper, you would refer to scholarly articles and books (secondary sources) written recently about Vergil’s Æneid, and you would draw upon those secondary sources when making arguments about how to interpret the primary source.

In general, you will want to quote and discuss primary sources, but paraphrase or cite and discuss secondary sources.

Remember: quotations and citations provide evidence, but they are not themselves arguments. You must use your evidence inside arguments that explain what the evidence shows. Consider the following questions:

Here are three examples that treat the same piece of evidence in progressively better ways.

Tiberius put aside the national dress, wearing instead a Greek cloak and slippers (Suet. Tib. 13).
So what? Why should I care how some guy dressed? What does his wearing slippers have to do with anything else in your paper?
As Tiberius retreated from his Roman identity, he abandoned even the outward appearance of his own people: he put aside the national dress, wearing instead a Greek cloak and slippers (Suet. Tib. 13).
This is better: the introductory clauses first situate your evidence in a wider scope of argumentation (Tib. withdraws from Roman identity) and specify how this particular evidence differs from the rest (this deals with external appearances as an indication of his internal state). The quotation makes sense now, because the reader can understand what it contributes to your arguments.
As Tiberius retreated from his Roman identity, he abandoned even the outward appearance of his own people, dressing in Greek instead of Roman clothes (Suet. Tib. 13). He became foreign inside and out.
This is the best way to handle this piece of evidence. Instead of quoting at length, this sentence makes quick reference to and citation of the evidence. Doing so saves time and space. You can use the space to reinforce your argument.

Citations

Citations are like URLs: they point to a primary or secondary source in a standardized way that readers can use to find your sources themselves. Primary source citations point to a stable, well-known body of literature ("the classics"), so they point directly to the author, work, and place within the work that you wish to discuss. Secondary source citations point to your bibliography, which in turn gives the reader the necessary information to locate the book, chapter, or journal article to which you refer.

Your bibliography gets lots of clunky information about locating secondary scholarship out of the main body of your paper, so that your paper is easier to read. Only secondary source information goes in the bibliography; primary sources do not belong there, because they point directly to ancient literature.

tapa style prefers inline citations over footnotes. When giving a simple reference to a single text, whether primary or secondary, do not add a footnote, but use the appropriate format from the sections Citing Primary Sources or Citing Secondary Sources below. You will cite your primary and secondary sources differently: you may be used to the format for secondary sources, but the bewildering variety of formats for primary sources is a sin peculiar to classical studies.

Citing Primary Sources

Citing a primary source means giving a reference to the original text using a standard system that all classical scholars will understand. Generally this does not mean giving page numbers: those are different for every translation or edition. Instead, classicists refer to line numbers of poems or sections and books of prose texts. The works of some authors, like Plato and Aristotle, have peculiar systems of reference like Stephanus Pagination. In the first appendix below, you can find examples of the primary source reference systems you will probably encounter this quarter.

Because the reference systems are standard and known throughout the academic community, there is no need to put primary sources in the bibliography. Everyone knows that Hom. Il. 4.123 means the one hundred and twenty third verse of the fourth book of Homer's Iliad. So, you should not put the Iliad, or any other primary source, in the bibliography. Only secondary sources belong in the bibliography.

When citing a primary source, you can use two means: inline or parenthetical citation.

If you write the author's name as part of the sentence, you use inline citation. Write the author's name out in full and then give the rest of the citation in abbreviated form, using the guidelines given in appendix 1.

Homer Od. 11.489–91 depicts the dead Achilles as repenting of his choice to die for glory.
Since Homer is the subject of the sentence, the citation follows immediately after it.

If the author's name is not part of the sentence, you use parenthetical citation. Abbreviate the author's name as well as the rest of the citation and enclose them in parentheses. Place the citation directly after the material you reference. If the parenthetical citation falls at the end of the sentence, the final punctuation of the sentence follows the parenthetical citation.

Achilles regrets his choice in the afterlife, telling Odysseus, I should choose, so I might live on earth, to serve as the hireling of another, of some portionless man whose livelihood was but small, rather than to be lord over all the dead that have perished (Hom. Od. 11.489–91).
The name Homer does not appear in the sentence itself, so abbreviate his name and place it with the citation in parentheses after the material referenced.
Achilles regrets his choice in the afterlife, telling Odysseus that he would rather continue living without glory (Hom. Od. 11.489–91).
Again, the sentence does not mention Homer, so a parenthetical citation follows the paraphrase. Note that paraphrases are usually shorter than quotations, and shorter is better.

Each classical text has its own peculiar system of division, some into books and chapters or sections, others into poems and verses, still others into other divisions. This is usally evident in the text, since most editions print some sort of reference numbers in the margins. Scholars use these as standard forms of reference instead of page numbers of translations of primary sources. Each translation will have different pagination: a quote on page 123 of one translation might appear on page 456 of another translation. The standard citation format for the original text, however, always remains constant: something in section 447b of Plato's Gorgias, regardless of the translation you use, will always be found in a section numbered 447b, although it will occur on a different page in each different translation and sometimes in different editions of the same translation. So, use the standard section numbering for each author, as outlined below.

Furthermore, classicists also abbreviate authors’ names and titles of works in citations. The abbreviations always shorten the Latin titles of the works, even for Greek works, which can cause confusion since the letters may seem to have nothing to do with the English or Greek titles familiar to you (eg. Aristophanes' Ὄρνιθες or Birds is Aves in Latin, so it gets the abbreviation Av., even though that looks nothing like the Greek or English titles). The tapa style defines these abbreviations as those used in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, and you can find those abbreviations all listed in the first Appendix to this style guide. Citations with abbreviated author and title names do not require any commas, just periods.

important: Abbreviate the author’s name in citations; spell out the author’s name if you use it in a sentence, but abbreviate it if it belongs to the citation only.

Lucian wrote many works about cheese.

but,

Menippus even speaks with Cerberus (Luc. Dial. mort. 21).
Lucian is abbreviated Luc. because he is part of the citation and not the syntactic structure of the sentence.

The same applies to titles of books: abbreviate titles in citations, but write them out fully in a sentence.

A Note on Translation Credit

In an article for publication, scholars quote in Greek or Latin and give a translation. Most of the time, they write the translation themselves, because they are capable scholars who can read Greek and Latin. In the rare instance that someone incapable of reading Greek and Latin were to think that he should be writing an article on Greek and Latin texts that he had only encountered through translation and was utterly unable to read for himself, then he would have to cite the translation to give credit to the translator. That would mean the translation of a primary source would end up in the bibliography. In practice, this does not happen, because Greek and Latin are not hard to learn, and nobody above the undergraduate level reads translations.

Since this is an undergraduate class, I do not expect you to read all the primary sources in the original languages. Nevertheless, you should not include the translations you use in your bibliography, since that would teach you a bad habit (polluting your bibliography with primary sources) that will never serve you well in real life.

Takeaways:

  • Bibliographies are for secondary scholarship only.
  • Learn Greek and Latin if you plan on writing anything for publication.

Citing Secondary Sources

For secondary sources, give the last name of the author (or authors, separated by and for two authors or by commas and a final and for three or more authors) followed by the year colon space page number(s). Only include the initial of the author’s first name if several authors in your bibliography share the same last name. Otherwise, never refer to the author’s first name in a citation.

The author's last name and the publication year suffice to allow the reader to look up any other information in your bibliography. That is why you have a bibliography: to keep your paper from being cluttered up with information that pertains to your sources instead of your arguments.

If the author’s name appears as a part of the sentence, then write the year and page(s) immediately after (inline citation). On the other hand, if the author's name does not appear as part of the sentence, you need parentheses around the citation (parenthetical citation).

Russell 1967: 136 suggests that the Attic orators were unacquainted with stasis theory.
The author's name serves as the subject of the sentence, so the citation appears inline with the name without parentheses.
Attic orators were unacquainted with stasis theory (Russell 1967: 136).
Since the author's name played no part in the syntax of this sentence, we relegate it and the citation to parentheses.

If you cite a footnote or endnote, give the page number, the letter “n,” and the number of the note, all without intervening spaces or periods.

Hawkins 2012: 334n14 demolishes the false etymology of salapūtium from pūtus.
Salapūtium is not derived of pūtus (Hawkins 2012: 334n14).

Avoid quoting secondary sources; you should engage other scholars by paraphrasing or discussing their work, not by repeating or parroting them. Do not cite the same secondary source several times in a row: that means that you have constructed your arguments poorly and rely too much on one or two other scholars.

Footnotes

Footnotes are not for simple references to a single source: that belongs to inline citations. Footnotes are where you cite multiple sources or where you explore arguments that are tangental to your thesis. The former is useful, but be careful with the latter. You should be able to justify to yourself (and to me) both

  1. why you are including the digression at all, if it has so little to do with your arguments that it does not belong in the main body of your paper; and
  2. why you are separating the argument from the rest of your paper by shoving it into a footnote, if you feel that it is important enough to keep in your paper.

Consider those two questions when you look at the length of your footnotes as well: if your notes take up a considerable portion of the page, perhaps they contain elements that either belong in the main body of the paper or do not belong in the paper at all.

Footnote markers belong after a comma or period but before a semicolon or colon.

The first half of this sentence has its own footnote1; the second half has two,2 one after a comma and one at the end of the sentence.3
Footnotes come before a semicolon or colon and after a period or comma.

Do not use endnotes. They are hard to read, because one has to flip back and forth between the main text and the notes; footnotes are on the same page as the text to which they refer, which makes life much easier on your reader (me).

Note: The tapa style guide requires submissions to use endnotes instead of footnotes, but the journal itself prints those endnotes as footnotes. This is a point where contradicting the tapa style guide brings us closer to the same journal's practice.

Bibliography

The bibliography exists for two reasons. First, it helps scholars keep track of secondary sources. A scholar who finds an article on Juvenal, for example, knows that he or she will find at the end of that article a list of recent articles, chapters and books relevant to the topic of the article. This becomes more helpful the further into your academic career you get. Advanced scholars appreciate having lists of secondary sources about topics of interest.

Second, the bibliography gets information about where to find sources out of the body and footnotes of your paper. Your inline or parenthetical citations serve as pointers to the bibliography, so that titles and publishers and journal names do not clutter up the rest of your paper. The body of your paper contains only your arguments and evidence, backed up by brief citations. Details that do not pertain to your arguments, like which journal published which article in which volume and on which pages, live in the bibliography where they remain safely contained.

In your bibliography, list both the secondary sources that you cited and any translations that you used for primary sources. Do not count the translations against any quota or requirement for the number of secondary sources that you need in your paper.

Titles of scholarly works often consist of two parts, a main title (on the top line or before a colon) and a subtitle (on the next line or after a colon). Take for example:

The Ultimate Crime: Parricidium and the Concept of Family in the Late Roman Republic and Early Empire.

This breaks down into:

main title
The Ultimate Crime
subtitle
Parricidium and the Concept of Family in the Late Roman Republic and Early Empire.

Some more progressive journals only require the main title, eschewing the subtitle. We are not so progressive. Write the full title in the bibliography.

Regarding the place of publication, the old rule was that the city of publication was just the city, with no further geographic information. Then America happened, which confused Europeans terribly: now there was a "real" Cambridge (in England, where Cambridge University had its press) and an American Cambridge (Massachusetts, home of Harvard University Press). Moreover, Europeans in general know far less about New World geography than they admit, and American place names mean nothing to them.

So, to humor the Europeans, Americans append the postal code for the U.S. state after the city name for all U.S. cities other than New York. This is stupid and pointless (it would make more sense to write the name of the publisher and omit the place of publication), but it is an academic custom, and the nature of academic customs is that they must be followed unquestioningly.

Set up indentation so that the first line is not indented, but subsequent lines get a "hanging" indentation of ½ inch (36 points). In Word, this is

Format > Paragraph > Indents and Spacing > Indentation > Special: Hanging by 0.5″

If you use Pages on a Mac, you'll find this in the Style Options pane on the right-hand side of the window: click the Layout tab and, under Indents, set First to 0″ and Left to 0.5″. It is best to save this as a new Paragraph Style so that you can apply it again easily to other bibliography entries.

Alphabetize your bibliography by the (first) author’s last name. If you list several works by the same author, put them in chronological order (older before newer). If you list two or more works that one author published in the same year, add a letter (a, b, c, etc.) to the year in the bibliography and cite the source in your body text or notes using the year-letter combination.

Krause 2015a: 13
p. 13 of the first of several publications by Krause in the year 2015
Krause 2015b: 57
p. 57 of the second of Krause' publications in the year 2015

Monographs

Monographs are books written (-graph) by one (mono-) author. Give the following information:

  • Author (last name, initial of first name) period space
  • Year of publication period space
  • Title of monograph, italicized period space
  • (If the book is translated: Trans. by [last name, initial of first name]) period space
  • City of publication colon space Publisher period

If there is more than one author, list them separated by the word and, with the period after the final author.

Example Bibliography
  • Breitenberger, B. 2007. Aphrodite and Eros. New York: Routledge.
  • Meyer, E. 2004. Legitimacy and Law in the Roman World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • de Romilly, J. 1975. Magic and Rhetoric in Ancient Greece. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Theses and Dissertations

A thesis or dissertation is a monograph written as part of a course of university study. The difference comes in the last bit of the formula: instead of "city: publisher," you get: "document type: university."

  • Author (last name, initial of first name) period space
  • Year of publication period space
  • Title of thesis or dissertation, italicized period space
  • MA Thesis or PhD Dissertation colon space University period
Example Bibliography
  • van Groesen, M. 2007. The De Bry Collection of Voyages (1590-1634): Editorial Strategy and the Representations of the Overseas World. PhD Dissertation: University of Amsterdam.
  • Watson, T. 2010. The Rhetoric of Corruption in Late Antiquity. PhD Dissertation: University of California Riverside.

Journal Articles

Classicists write briefer bibliographic entries for journal articles than do scholars in other fields, especially the modern languages:

  • Author (last name, initial of first name) period space
  • Year of publication period space
  • Title of article in quotation marks period (period goes inside quotation marks) space
  • Title of journal, italicized space volume number colon space page range period

If there is more than one author, list them separated by the word and with the period after the final author. Do not include the edition number with the volume number (with no vol or fasc abbreviation or anything tacky like that). If you found the article online, do not put its URL or DOI or “Web” or date of access or any of that nonsense: nobody cares where you found the article, just where other people with decent libraries can find it.

Write out (and italicize) the full name of the journal. Many journals now require that authors abbreviate the names of journals using the abbreviations found in L'Année philologique. If a journal is not listed in L’Année philologique, do not attempt to abbreviate it: your reader has probably never heard of that journal before and will need the full name to locate it. You may find the official list in the second appendix to this document.

For you, abbreviation is optional. Your bibliographic entries become mercifully shorter through the magic of abbreviation, but you do not have to take that extra step for this class.

Example Bibliography (without abbreviations)
  • Conte, G.B. and Most, G. 1989. Love Without Elegy: the Remedia Amoris and the Logic of a Genre. Poetics Today 10: 441–69.
  • Ianziti, G. 1998. Bruni on Writing History. Renaissance Quarterly 51: 367–91.
  • Lassen, E. 1992. The Ultimate Crime: Parricidium and the Concept of Family in the Late Roman Republic and Early Empire. Classica Et Mediaevalia 43: 147–61.
  • Sandy, G. 1974. Scaenica Petroniana. Transactions of the American Philological Association 104: 329–46.
Example Bibliography (with abbreviations)
  • Conte, G.B. and Most, G. 1989. Love Without Elegy: the Remedia Amoris and the Logic of a Genre. Poetics Today 10: 441–69.
  • Ianziti, G. 1998. Bruni on Writing History. RenQ 51: 367–91.
  • Lassen, E. 1992. The Ultimate Crime: Parricidium and the Concept of Family in the Late Roman Republic and Early Empire. C&M 43: 147–61.
  • Sandy, G. 1974. Scaenica Petroniana. TAPA 104: 329–46.
Note that the first entry above (Conte and Most 1989) does not get an abbreviation, because Poetics Today does not appear in L’Année philologique’s list of journals. It is therefore unlikely that a reader familiar with the classics would recognize whatever abbreviation scholars of modern poetry might customarily apply to Poetics Today. To avoid confusion, write out the whole title of the journal.

Chapters in Edited Books

The edited book is a fairly recent phenomenon: instead of submitting articles to peer-reviewed journals, some scholars now get together with others of like interests to publish articles on a common theme together as a book. Often, these “edited books” are spawned from conferences: someone seems to have reinvented the acta or “conference proceedings” and given them a new name. In the twenty-first century, it is unfortunately difficult to find a bibliography that does not include a few of these. Think of the bibliographic format for chapters in edited books as a hybrid of the formats for journal articles and monographs; these are therefore never short entries.

  • Author (last name, initial of first name) period space
  • Year of publication period space
  • Title of chapter in quotation marks period (period goes inside quotation marks) space
  • In and name(s) of editors in the same format as the author’s name, followed by ed for one editor or eds for several editors period space
  • Title of book, italicized period space
  • City of publication colon space Publisher period space
  • page numbers of article awkwardly dangling off the end period
Example Bibliography
  • Tomassi, G.L. 2015. Tyrants and Tyrannicides: Between Literary Creation and Contemporary Reality in Greek Declamation. In Amato, E., Citti, F. and Huelsenbeck, B. eds. Law and Ethics in Greek and Roman Declamation. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. 249–67.
  • Trevor-Roper, H. 1988. The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland. In Hobsbawm, E. and Ranger, T. eds. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 15–41.
  • Winterbottom, M. 2003. Ennodius, Dictio 21. In Schröder, B. and Schröder, J. eds. Studium Declamatorium. Münich: Saur. 275–88.

Other Sources

Wikipedia is not a source. You would not cite graffiti on a wall, so why would you cite some web page that anyone in the world could modify? Find a real source.

Do not try to cite encyclopedias, dictionaries, handbooks, or other tertiary reference works. They exist to orient you at a shallow (“Powerpoint-Deep,” as they say now) level, not to interpret or provide a deep understanding of any subject. Find a real source.

Do not bother trying to cite blog entries about anything. Do not cite (or read) web pages purporting to demonstrate extraterrestrial involvement in the ancient world or that claim to offer insight into ancient society based on the author’s personal, transcendental experiences (however profound they may seem) worshipping the cats of Isis. Find a peer-reviewed, secondary source.

Find a real source. Use peer-reviewed sources. Peer-review is the process by which a panel of editors or readers well-versed in the subject of the book or article check to ensure that it contains arguments backed up with solid evidence. A decent publishing house or journal will weed out any foolish nonsense. Stick with sources that have been vetted by traditional publishing houses (like Oxford University Press or Brill) and respectable journals (like Transactions of the American Philological Association and Mnemosyne). Don't fall for self-publishers, vanity publishers, or wacky cults like the Association for Research and Enlightenment.

The classics librarian in the library will be glad to help you. Always try scholar.google.com and jstor.org (preferably from campus, since more will be available to you from a campus IP address).

Editing Tips

Between your rough draft, your presentation, and your final draft, you will probably edit your paper several times. Some simple steps, like eliminating forms of to be, will improve any English prose, no matter how dry the subject.

Active Instead of Passive Voice

Good Latin and Greek authors love the passive voice, but good English authors avoid it. In an active sentence, the subject does some action; in a passive voice, something is done to the subject.

Popilius betrays Cicero.
Active: subject (Popilius) does the action to the direct object (Cicero)
Cicero is betrayed by Popilius.
Passive: subject (Cicero) does not do anything himself, but the action happens to him through the agency of someone expressed in a prepositional phrase ("by Popilius")

Passive sentences are longer, more complex, and weaker than active sentences. You want to write strong, brief, straightforward sentences.

The passive voice has only one redeeming virtue in English: it allows you to omit or hide the agent of some action.That may be useful in politics or other fields that encourage one to dodge responsibility, but academic writing requires you to attribute responsibility whenever possible.

Delete Forms of To Be

Search (⌘f on Mac or ctrl+f on Windows or Linux) through your paper for the following:

is, am, are, was, were, be, being, been

Every time you find one of those, rewrite the sentence in which you found it so that you can eliminate that form of to be. Make it a personal goal to eliminate all forms of to be from your paper. This will keep you from using the copula instead of an action verb, from using the progressive aspect, and from using the passive voice.

Cæsar was in charge in Gaul led the Romans in Gaul.
The action verb led sounds stronger than was.
Cæsar was leading led the Romans to victory.
The simple aspect of the verb sounds stronger than the progressive.
Cæsar was killed by died at the hands of the Senate.
Active sentences always sound stronger than passive sentences.

Delete Unnecessary Adverbs

Some adverbs, like those indicating order (first, then, next, finally) or negation (not, never, nowhere), convey important meaning and must remain in your sentences. Others, however, especially those of degree (greatly, very much, strongly) add little or nothing to your prose. You should eliminate any adverbs that you can, and adverbs of degree provide you with a good place to start trimming.

Cicero strongly opposed building a Kwik-E-Mart in the Roman Forum.
The adverb strongly does not add much to the verb opposed, so delete it.

Quote and Quotation

Quote is a verb, not a noun. Quotation is the noun for something that one quotes.

He quotes three lines from Juvenal.
The quotation highlights Horace' subtle wit.
wrong: This quote highlights Horace' subtle wit.
quote is not a noun

Appendices

These appendices contain official lists of abbreviations used according to the tapa style guide.

Appendix 1: Primary Source Abbreviations

Abbreviate primary source author names and titles according to the linked table from the ocd (Oxford Classical Dictionary).

ocd Author and Title Abbreviations

Primary Source Reference System Details

Below, you will find details on citing primary source authors whom you are likely to encounter.

Stephanus Pagination (Plato, Plutarch's Moralia)

When referring to any of Plato's dialogues or Plutarch's Moralia, write the title of the work and its Stephanus pagination, which consists of two elements: a number and a lowercase letter between a and e. No space comes between the number and letter. You will usually find the Stephanus pagination (number-letter combination) written in the margin of your text. For example, if you wanted to refer to the opening sentence of Plato's Gorgias, you would look to the margin and find 447a written. The next section would be 447b, then 447c, and so on until 447e, which comes before 448a; the final sentence of the Gorgias falls in section 527e. When you cite Plato or Plutarch's Moralia, give the author, title, a space, and the Stephanus pagination (number-letter combination). Plutarch's Lives, however, have their own internal section numbers that are not part of the Stephanus pagination.

Alcibiades in Plato's Symposium 214c complains that pitting a drunken man against a sober man is unfair in: Pl. Sym. 214c
Plato Phaedrus 244a–245b (on love as madness) Pl. Phdr. 244a–245b
The first sentences of Plato's Apology: Pl. Apol. 17a
Plutarch, The Dinner of the Seven Sages, first lines Plut. Septem. 146b
Plutarch Conjugalia praecepta 138d Plut. Conj. praec. 138d
Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus,
where the Egyptians talk about Lycurgus 		Plut. Lyc. 4.5
Lives do not use Stephanus pagination

You do not need to cite the line number of a reference in Plato or Plutarch: only the Stephanus pagination. A competent reader will be able to find the sentence without line numbers.

Bekker Pagination (Aristotle)

Bekker pagination is like Stephanus pagination but for Aristotle. For example, the Nicomachean Ethics begin on page 1094 in Bekker's edition, near the top of the page, so you would cite:

Arist. Eth. Nic. 1094a

You do not need to worry about the line number.

Scholars in other fields (especially religious studies) tend to use book and chapter numbers; these are, often, much easier for locating a reference, but classicsts do not use them.

Fragmentary Authors

Some authors' works survive only as fragments. These are often gathered by editors into collections, like Gerber's Greek Iambic Poetry. Be careful: not only fragments but also testimonia (what ancient people said about the poet or his works) are bundled together. If your quotation is a fragment, abbreviate fr.; if a testimonium, T.; then give the number and the editor's name.

For example, to cite the Archilochean distich beginning ἐν δορὶ μέν μοι μᾶζα, you would write:

Archil. fr. 2 Gerber

If you're using an anthology (like Games of Venus for the course on ancient love), just follow the abbreviated citations given with each fragment. Someone else has done all the work for you!

Examples for Specific Authors

Each primary source has its own traditional system of citation. You will find the following relevant to your interests this quarter.

Achilles Tatius (Ach. Tat.)

Achilles Tatius wrote only one surviving work, the novel Leucippe and Clitophon, in eight books. Since there is only one work to this author, you do not need to give its title in citations, and it has no abbreviation. Give the book number and the section number.

Achilles Tatius Leucippe and Clitophon book 4 section 22 Ach. Tat. 4.22
Apollonius of Rhodes (Ap. Rhod.)

There are a lot of Greek authors named Apollonius, so you need to add in the Rhod. to make clear that you don't mean Apollonius the paradoxographer or Apollonius Dyscolus or some other Apollonius. Apollonius' main surviving work is the Argonautica (Argon.), but there are some epigrams and fragments too, so you do need to specify Argon.; also give the book number and line number you wish to cite.

Apollonius of Rhodes Argonautica book 3 line 200 Ap. Rhod. Argon. 3.200
Apuleius (Apul.)

Apuleius wrote many interesting things, including a defense speech for himself, the Apologia (Apol.), and a bizarre novel in bizarre Latin with a Greek title: Metamorphoses (Met.).

Aristophanes (Ar.)

The comic poet Aristophanes gets one of the shortest abbreviations: Ar. Among his works stands the Lysistrata (Lys.); cite the verse number.

Aristophanes Lysistrata verse 456 Ar. Lys. 456
Gaius Valerius Catullus (Catull.)

Catullus, a contemporary of Cicero, wrote many poems, perhaps in different books. Today, they all have numbers. Reference the poems by number and verse number.

Catullus, poem 16, verse 1 Catull. 16.1
Marcus Tullius Cicero (Cic.)

Cicero is the preeminent Latin orator and the gold standard of Latin prose style. His fourteen Philippics aginst Mark Antony get the abbreviation Phil.. If citing the Philippics, give the number of the speech and the section number.

Cicero Philippics speech 2, section 14 Cic. Phil. 2.14
Dio Chrysostomus (Dio Chrys.)

Few people today read the Orations (Or.) of Dio Chrysostomus, which is a shame. His first Tarsic Discourse has the number 33. Give the speech number and section number.

Dio Chrysostomus Orations 33 section 7 Dio Chrys. 33.7
Euripides (Eur.)

Euripides wrote tragedies. Give the name of the tragedy and the numbers of the lines you are citing.

Euripides Trojan Women verses 523–24 Eur. Tro. 523–24
Gorgias (Gorg.)

Gorgias, the sophist, wrote a number of works that survive in fragments but also the Helen (Hel.) and Palamedes (Pal.). Give the section number too.

Gorgias Helen section 3 Gorg. Hel. 3
Gorgias Palamedes section 3 Gorg. Pal. 3
Hesiod (Hes.)

Works ascribed to Hesiod include the Theogony (Theog.) and the Works and Days (Op.). Cite with the work and line number.

Hesiod Theogony 116–206 Hes. Theog. 116–206
Homer (Hom.)

Works ascribed to Homer include the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Homeric Hymns. The Iliad (Il.) and Odyssey (Od.) are divided into twenty-four books each, and each book consists of hundreds of verses. The Homeric Hymns (Hom. Hymn) consist of 33 poems about different gods and goddesses. Some people refer to them by the name of that god or goddess, such as Hom. Hymn Dem. for the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, but that can cause confusion, since there are two hymns to Demeter in the collection. Since the order of the hymns is standard, it is best to refer to them by number: Hom. Hymn 2 for the first hymn to Demeter. After a period, give the verse number or numbers as well.

Homer Odyssey book 6, verse 265 Hom. Od. 6.265
Homer Hymn to Demeter verse 33 Hom. Hymn 2.33
Homer Od. 6.265 discusses the allocation of berths in the Phaeacians' harbor.
This is an inline citation, because Homer is part of the sentence.
Each Phaeacian had his own berth in teh harbor. (Hom. Od. 6.265).
Parenthetical citations abbreviate the author's name.
Homer Hymn 4.39–61 describes Hermes' appropriation of the turtle's shell, with which Hermes praises Zeus and Maia.
This is an inline citation, because Homer is part of the sentence.
Hermes kills the turtle for its shell so that he can praise his own lineage, a form of self-praise (Hom. Hymn 4.39–61)
Parenthetical citations abbreviate the author's name.
Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Hor.)

Horace' works include the Ars poetica (Ars P.) in a single book, four books of Odes (Carm. for Carmina) and one of Epodes (Epod.), the standalone Carmen saeculare (Carm. saec.), two books each of Sermones or Satirae (Sat.) and Epistulae (Epist.), which are also satires. Cite the title; the number of the book if it's Odes, Sermones, or Epistulae; the poem number if it's Odes, Epodes, Sermones, or Epistulae; and the verse number or numbers.

Horace Epodes poem 5 verses 21–22 Hor. Epod. 5.22
Horace Sermones book 2 poem 3 verse 4 Hor. Sat. 2.3.4
Isocrates (Isoc.)

Give the speech (such as the Helen, which you may abbreviate either Hel. or numerically without italics as 10) and the section number. The Busiris is Bus. or 11. Whichever form of citation (title or number) you adopt, stay consistent throughout your paper.

Isocrates, beginning of the Helen Isoc. Hel. 1
Isoc. 10.1
Isocrates, beginning of the Busiris Isoc. Bus. 1
Isoc. 11.1
Lucian (Luc.)

Lucian (whose name the OCD index misspells as "Lucan") is difficult to cite, because many of his dialogues have multiple titles, none of which in Greek resemble the Latin (whence are derived the abbreviations) nor the English with which you might be familiar. The Mistaken Critic is known by it's Latinized Greek title as Pseudologista, so its abbreviation is Pseudol.; and Dialogues of the Courtesans is in Latin Dialogi meretricii, so Dial. meret. Some are not on the ocd list but have traditional abbreviations: Phalaris is Phal., Dialogues of the Sea Gods is Dial. marin., and the Praise of the Fly is Musc. enc. (from its Latin title, Muscae encomium). All the dialogues have section numbers. The Dialogues of the Sea Gods and Dialogues of the Courtesans are collections of dialogues, so be sure to cite the number of the dialogue too.

Lucian Dialogues of the Sea Gods dialogue 1 section 2. Luc. Dial. marin. 1.2
Lucian Dialogues of the Courtesans dialogue 1 section 2. Luc. Dial. meret. 1.2
Lucian Mistaken Critic section 1 Luc. Pseudol. 1
Lucian Phalaris section 1 Luc. Phal. 1
Lucian Praise of the Fly section 1 Luc. Musc. enc. 1
Lucian Pseudol. 20 verb blah blah blah blah.
I'm so bored with writing inline citations.
Blah blah verb blah blah blah (Luc. Pseudol. 20).
I'm also bored with writing parenthetical citations.
Titus Lucretius Carus (Lucr.)

Lucretius' only surviving work is the De Rerum Natura. Because that is Lucretius' only work, we do not have to cite its title, and there is no abbreviation. Cite by book and line number.

Lucretius De Rerum Natura book 4 verses 1101–04. Lucr. 4.1101–04
Lucretius 4.1101–04 suggests that Venus deceives lovers.
When the author's name is part of the sentence, use an inline citation with no parentheses and spell out the author's name.
Venus can also deceive lovers (Lucr. 4.1101–04).
When the author's name is not part of the sentence, give a parenthetical citation.
Publius Ovidius Naso (Ov.)

Ovid wrote many things; you will likely cite the Ars amatoria (Ars am.) in three books or the single book of the Remedia amoris (Rem. am.). If a multi-book work, give the book number; give the verse number.

Ovid Ars amatoria book 3 verse 55 Ov. Ars am. 3.55
Ovid Remedia amoris verse 66 Ov. Rem. am. 66
Pindar (Pind.)

Pindar wrote epinician odes celebrating atheltic victories and divided into four books, named after the four great games: Isthmian (Isthm.), Nemean (Nem.), Olympian (Ol.), and Pythan (Pyth.).

Pindar Nemean Odes ode 8, lines 38–39 Pind. Nem. 8.38–39
Pindar Nem. 8.38–39 contrasts praise and blame.
This is an inline citation, because the author's name is part of the sentence.
I pray to find favor with my fellow-citizens until my limbs are buried in the earth / by praising what is praiseworthy and casting blame on wrongdoers (Pind. Nem. 8.38–39).
Parenthetical citations abbreviate the author's name.
Plato

See Stephanus Pagination.

Plutarch

If citing the Moralia (like the Conjugalia praecepta), see Stephanus Pagination.

The lives, like the Life of Lycurgus (Lyc.) do not have Stephanus pagination. Just cite the chapter and section.

Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus, chapter 4, section 5
where the Egyptians talk about Lycurgus 		Plut. Lyc. 4.5
[Marcus Fabius Quintilianus] ([Quint.])

Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, or Quintilian, was a real person. Whoever wrote the Declamationes maiores (Decl. Maj.) was probably not that Quintilian. When citing a work thought to be falsely attributed to an author (it happens), put the author's name in square brackets []. It used to be the case that scholars would prefix pseudo- to the name, but [] is briefer, and briefer is better. The Declamationes Maiores consist of nineteen speeches, each with a number and consisting of numbered sections.

[Quintilian] Declamationes maiores 13 section 4 [Quint.] Decl. Maj. 13.4
Quintus Smyrnaeus (Quint. Smyrn.)

Only one work, the Posthomerica in fourteen books, survives from Quintus Smyrnaeus' hand. As is usual for authors with only one work, there is no abbreviation for the work: citations consist only of the author's name, the number of the book, and the verse number.

Quintus Smyrnaeus Posthomerica book 10, lines 447–68. Quint. Smyrn. 10.447–68.
Quintus Smyrnaeus 10.447–68 says that one heart felt grief at Paris' death.
This is an inline citation, because the author's name is part of the sentence.
Œnone, whom Paris had abandoned, was the only one to grieve his death (Quint. Smyrn. 10.447–68).
Parenthetical citations abbreviate the author's name.
Synesius

Synesius is a late author with few surviving works. He does not make it into the abbreviations of the Oxford Classical Dictionary, so spell everything out. No abbreviations for Synesius. Cite with his name, the name of the oration, and the section number.

Publius Terentius Afer (Terence, Ter.)

Terence wrote comedies, including the Eunuchus (Eun.). Cite with verse number.

Terence Eunuchus verse 789 Ter. Eun. 789
Theocritus (Theoc.)

Theocritus is most well known for his cowboy poetry or Idylls (Id.), but he also wrote epigrams and a Syrinx, so you do need to specify the Id. if you are referencing them. Give the number of the Idyll and line number that you wish to cite.

Theocritus idyll 11 verses 1–2 Theoc. Id. 11.1–2
Theognis (Thgn.)

Because so many Greek names begin with Theo-, Theognis' name receives an unusal abbreviation, something other than the first syllable and a half with a dot afterwards.

Theognis' poetry survives as a jumbled mass of verses. It is not clear where one poem leaves off and another starts. So, the whole mess just has line numbers with no other division. Cite the verse line numbers.

Theognis line 133 Thgn. 133
Theognis 133 claims, "No man himself is the cause of loss and gain."
Theognis is the subject of the sentence, so use an in-line citation, spelling out his name.
"No man himself is the cause of loss and gain" (Thgn. 133).
In the parenthetical citation, abbreviate Theognis' name.
Publius Vergilius Maro (Verg.)

Vergil wrote the Aeneid (Aen.), which consists of twelve books of epic verse, as well as one book of ten Bucolics or cowboy-poems, also called Eclogues (Ecl.), and four books of Georgics (G.).

Vergil Aeneid book 4, line 296 Verg. Aen. 4.296
Vergil eclogue 4 lines 37–59 Verg. Ecl. 4.37–59
Vergil Aen. 4.296 remarks on the infallibility of love.
This is an inline citation, because Vergil is part of the sentence.
For all her apparent insanity, Dido remains perceptive: Who could deceive a lover? (Verg. Aen. 4.296).
Parenthetical citations abbreviate the author's name.
Xenophon (Xen.)

Give the work and any book (if a multi-book work), chapter, and section numbers.

beginning of Xenophon's Apology
This work has only section numbers. 		Xen. Ap. 1
third section of second chapter of first book of the Memorabilia
This work has book, chapter, and section numbers. 		Xen. Mem. 1.2.3
Xenophon, Symposium chapter 8 section 7
This work has both chapters and section numbers. 		Xen. Symp. 8.7
Xenophon Symp. 8.7 suggests that the whole world knows that Callias loves Autolycus.
Here we've made Xenophon the subject of the sentence, so let's use an in-line citation. The next example is better, though.
Socrates claims that the whole world seems to know that Callias loves Autolycus (Xen. Symp. 8.7).
Properly, not Xenophon but his character Socrates makes the claim, so here we have put Socrates as the subject and relegated Xenophon to a parenthetical citation.

Appendix 2: Secondary Source Abbreviations

Abbreviate journal titles according to the following table from L'Année philologique.

Liste des périodiques dépouillés