The TLG was founded in 1972 by Marianne McDonald (a graduate student at the time and now a professor of theater and classics at the University of California, San Diego) with the goal to create a comprehensive digital collection of all surviving texts written in Greek from antiquity to the present era.
Since 1972, the TLG has collected and digitized most surviving literary texts written in Greek from Homer to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 CE, and beyond.
Maria Pantelia, also a classics professor at UC Irvine, succeeded Theodore Brunner in 1998, and has been directing the TLG since.
Under the direction of Professor Maria Pantelia, a number of new projects were undertaken, including the massive migration out of Ibycus, the development of a new system to digitize, proofread, and manage the textual collection, a new CD-ROM (TLG E), released in 1999, and eventually the move of the corpus to the web environment in 2001.
The corpus continues to be expanded significantly to include Byzantine, medieval, and eventually modern Greek texts.