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Loeb Classical Library

Loeb Classical Library:Volume 6 of the Latin collection in the Loeb Classical Library, second edition 1988
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Volume 6 of the Latin collection in the Loeb Classical Library, second edition 1988
Loeb Classical Library:Volume 170N of the Greek collection in the Loeb Classical Library, revised edition
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Volume 170N of the Greek collection in the Loeb Classical Library, revised edition

The Loeb Classical Library is a series of books, today published by the Harvard University Press, which presents important works of ancient Greek and Latin Literature in a way designed to make the text accessible to the broadest possible audience, by presenting the original Greek or Latin text on each left-hand leaf, and a fairly literal translation on the facing page. They represent the Everyman's Library of Antiquity, the canon of our Classical heritage spanning fourteen centuries of epics and lyric poetry; tragedy and comedy; history, travel, philosophy, and oratory; medical writers, geographers and mathematicians. The Loeb Classical Library also extends to cover those Church fathers who made particular use of pagan culture.


Contents

Origin

The series was conceived and initially funded by James Loeb. The first volumes were edited by T. E. Page, W. H. D. Rouse, and Edward Capps, and published by William Heinemann and company in 1912, already in their distinctive green (for Greek text) and red (for Latin) hardcover bindings, which are instantly recognizable today. Since then scores of new titles have been added, and the earliest translations have been revised several times. In recent years, this has included the removal of earlier editions' bowdlerization, which habitually extended to reversal of gender to disguise homosexual references. Profit from the editions continues to fund graduate student fellowships at Harvard University.

Reception

Although some serious classicists spurn the Loebs, which have only a minimal critical apparatus, as amateurish, and many non-classicists, conversely, are unimpressed by the relatively pedestrian prose of the English translations (necessary because of the desire to remain as literal as possible), the Loeb editions are nonetheless ubiquitous, still the "handy books of a size that would fit in a gentleman's pocket" that they were in 1912, though now they slip into a sweatshirt hoodie.

In 1917 Virginia Woolf wrote (in the Times Literary Supplement):

The Loeb Library, with its Greek or Latin on one side of the page and its English on the other, came as a gift of freedom...The existence of the amateur was recognised by the publication of this Library, and to a great extent made respectable...The difficulty of Greek is not sufficiently dwelt upon, chiefly perhaps because the sirens who lure us to these perilous waters are generally scholars [who] have forgotten...what those difficulties are. But for the ordinary amateur they are very real and very great; and we shall do well to recognise the fact and to make up our minds that we shall never be independent of our Loeb.

Harvard University assumed complete responsibility for the series in 1989 and in recent years four or five new or re-edited volumes are published annually.

In 2001, Harvard University Press began issuing a third series of books with a similar format. The I Tatti Renaissance Library presents key Medieval and Renaissance works in their original language (usually Latin) with a facing English translation; it is bound similarly to the Loeb Classics, but with blue covers. (The books' dimensions, however, are slightly larger.)

Volumes published

Tips for readers:

Greek

Poetry

Epic Poetry
Homer
Other
Lyric and Choral Poetry, Iambic and Elegiac Poetry
Hellenistic Poetry
Greek Anthology

Drama

Aeschylus
Sophocles
Euripides
Aristophanes
Menander

Philosophers

Aristotle
Athenaeus
Epictetus
Marcus Aurelius
Philo
Plato
Plotinus
Plutarch
Ptolemy
Sextus Empiricus
Theophrastus
Greek Mathematics (extracts)

Historians

Appian
Herodotus
Josephus
Manetho
Polybius
Thucydides
Xenophon

Attic orators

Aeschines
Demosthenes
Isaeus
Isocrates
Lysias
Minor Attic Orators

Greek Fathers

Basil
Clement of Alexandria
Eusebius
John Damascene
-- various, edited by Kirsopp Lake

Other Greek prose

Achilles Tatius
Aelian
Aeneas Tacticus
Babrius and Phaedrus
Alciphron
Apollodorus
Chariton
Dio Cassius
Dio Chrysostom
Diodorus Siculus
Diogenes Laertius
Dionysius of Halicarnassus
Galen
Hippocrates
Julian
Libanius
Longus
Lucian
Nonnos
Oppian
Pausanias
Philostratus the Elder and Philostratus the Younger
Philostratus
Strabo

Latin

Ammianus Marcellinus
Apuleius
Arrian
Augustine
Ausonius

Bede

Boethius

Julius Caesar

Cato and Varro

Catullus

Celsus

Cicero

Claudian

Columella

Cornelius Nepos

Curtius

Florus

Frontinus

Fronto

Gellius

Herodian

Horace

Jerome

Juvenal and Persius

Livy

Lucan

Lucretius

Manilius

Martial

Ovid

Petronius

Plautus

Pliny the Younger

Pliny

Procopius

Propertius

Prudentius

Quintilian

Quintus Smyrnaeus

Sallust

Seneca the Elder

Seneca the Younger

Sidonius

Silius Italicus

Statius

Suetonius

Tacitus

Terence

Tertullian

Valerius Flaccus

Valerius Maximus

Varro

Velleius Paterculus

Virgil

Vitruvius

Minor Latin Poets edited by J. W. Duff

The Augustan History, edited by D. Magie

Papyri

Old Latin, edited by Warmington, E.H.

References

Categories


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