This is a quick post to mention two new Latin literature Twitter bots. I’ll post the technical stuff below, but if you’d like a little Latin in your Twitter feed, or would like to have your fortune told by Vergil, look no further.
The distichs of Cato, tweeted randomly by the hour. These two-line hexameter poems giving moral guidance were long used as a standard text book and were admired by everyone from Erasmus to Ben Franklin.
Example:
3.1. Instrue praeceptis animum, nec discere cesses;
Nam sine doctrina vita est quasi mortis imago.— Dionysius Cato (@DistichaCatonis) April 5, 2015
The Sortes Vergilianae (Vergilian Lots) were reportedly used by Hadrian, among others, and now they can easily be consulted by you on Twitter. Address the bot formally with a colon (e.g., “@LotsByVergil: …”) and he’ll tell you your fortune. It’s up to you to interpret the results.
Example:
You can now talk about @LotsByVergil without triggering a response.
— theCAMPVS (@theCAMPVS) April 18, 2015
@theCAMPVS 8. 646:
Nec non Tarquinium eiectum Porsenna iubebat— Sortes Vergilianae (@LotsByVergil) April 18, 2015
Now onto the technical bits, which I’ve posted over at GitHub:
First up, is the Sortes Vergilianae bot, which responds to requests on Twitter.
Sortes
This bot uses the Aeneid API to reply to mentions on Twitter by posting random lines from Vergil’s Aeneid, to perform the “Sortes Vergilianae,” a kind of ancient bibliomancy by which people could obtain a fortune from Vergil’s epic poem.
The resulting bot is @LotsByVergil.
The bot is invoked by including a colon after it’s name, e.g., “@LotsByVergil: What’s my fortune?” This allows people to talk about the bot without triggering a response.
Installation
You’ll need NPM, NodeJS, and the twit and request modules:
sudo npm install --save twit
sudo npm install --save request
You’ll also need your Twitter API keys.
- Log in to Twitter on the web and add your mobile or Google Voice number to your account:
- Settings > Mobile
- You can delete it once your keys are generated
- Visit Twitter Apps and create your app keys
For running locally, you can keep a simple shell script (added to .gitignore to ensure it isn’t committed) that passes your keys when it executes:
#!/path/to/shell
CONSUMER_KEY='…' CONSUMER_SECRET='…' ACCESS_TOKEN='…' ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET='…' node index.js
Replace the ellipses with the keys obtained from Twitter. I named mine local.sh.
Usage
If you build something from this bot, you’ll probably deployit through Heroku, and there are some things you should know.
- You don’t need to pay for dynos. One dyno is enough.
- Heroku scales a web dyno by default, but your Twitter bot will use a single worker dyno. You’ll need to scale it yourself on the command line:
heroku ps:scale worker=1 - You don’t want to put your Twitter keys in anything committed. They should be stored as environment variables and added on the command line with the following commands (replacing the ellipses with your Twitter keys):
heroku config:set CONSUMER_KEY=…
heroku config:set CONSUMER_SECRET=…
heroku config:set ACCESS_TOKEN=…
heroku config:set ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET=…
Alternatively, you can pull the .env file from Heroku, edit it locally in your editor of choice (it’s a hidden file, but a good editor should see it), and then push the new .env file back to Heroku:
heroku config:pull
heroku config:push
Next is the Disticha Catonis bot, which differs in being run on a schedule and pulling distichs at random from the corpus:
Disticha
This twitterbot posts random distichs (bits of moral teaching in the form of hexameter poetry) from the Disticha Catonis, written in the 3rd–4th century CE by an otherwise unknown Dionysius Cato.
The code itself was cobbled carelessly from various sources and wrestled with through trial and error till it finally worked.
The resulting bot is @DistichaCatonis.
Installation
You’ll need NPM, NodeJS, and the twit module:
sudo npm install twit --save
You’ll also need your Twitter API keys.
- Log in to Twitter on the web and add your mobile or Google Voice number to your account:
- Settings > Mobile
- You can delete it once your keys are generated
- Visit Twitter Apps and create your app keys
For running locally, you can keep a simple shell script (added to .gitignore to ensure it isn’t committed) that passes your keys when it executes:
#!/path/to/shell
CONSUMER_KEY='…' CONSUMER_SECRET='…' ACCESS_TOKEN='…' ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET='…' node index.js
Replace the ellipses with the keys obtained from Twitter. I named mine local.sh.
Usage
If you build something from this bot, you’ll probably deploy it through Heroku, and there are some things you should know.
- You don’t need to pay for dynos. One dyno is enough.
- Heroku scales a web dyno by default, but your Twitter bot will use a single worker dyno. You’ll need to scale it yourself on the command line:
heroku ps:scale worker=1 - You don’t want to put your Twitter keys in anything committed. They should be stored as environment variables and added on the command line with the following commands (replacing the ellipses with your Twitter keys):
heroku config:set CONSUMER_KEY=…
heroku config:set CONSUMER_SECRET=…
heroku config:set ACCESS_TOKEN=…
heroku config:set ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET=…
Alternatively, you can pull the .env file from Heroku, edit it locally in your editor of choice (it’s a hidden file, but a good editor should see it), and then push the new .env file back to Heroku:
heroku config:pull
heroku config:push