Archives for July 2006

I don’t subscribe to the Weekly Standard and it’s literally been over a decade since I dealt with the classics (as they were called in more than one college English class) but I have nothing but respect and admiration for those who do (enjoy the classics, that is; I don’t know anyone who subscribes to the WS, so I don’t know what I think of their subscribers as a group.) At any rate, Tracy Lee Simmons wrote a great review of the Loeb Classical Library.  Here’s the excerpt:

"A Loeb Classical Library Reader

Harvard, 240 pp., $9.95

THEY DO CATCH THE EYE, those handsome, pint-sized green and red
books keeping their own elite company in the more recondite or
otherwise up-market bookstores.

Their simple covers don’t flash, though they fairly sing–sotto voce–their
authority. They may look quaint, but these midget volumes have become
the missals of the bookish classes. Generations have known them as "the
Loebs," though they belong to what is properly called the Loeb
Classical Library, and, within the English-speaking world, they are
deemed an essential accouterment to the life of the mind. For within
them we can find, in all their antiquated Greek and Latin glory, those
exquisite feats of the ancient Greeks and Romans in poetry, drama,
philosophy, and history–not to mention architecture, agriculture,
geography, engineering, mathematics, botany, zoology, and even
horsemanship and hunting.

Although they don’t strike us as the stuff of bestsellers, their
ubiquity surprises. One finds them equipping almost every public and
institutional library in the land, as well as residing in not a few
household libraries amassed by those with yearnings for intellectual
nourishment of the genuine kind. They look far more erudite than a set
of Penguins. They certify seriousness. Employing the royal "we" in a
way only she could do, Virginia Woolf, a creditable amateur classicist
herself, who once called Greek "the perfect language," said, "We shall
never be independent of our Loeb." And she meant it.

The source of the Loeb Library’s cachet may be shrouded from us in a
trifling age, but that of their popularity isn’t hard to discover:
Along with the original Greek and Latin texts printed on the left-hand
page as each book opens–texts, to say the least, of circumscribed
value to most people–on the right-hand side we find crisp,
unembellished English translations. The Loebs are the world’s classiest
crib, a trot for grownups. They are classics with a safety net. Here
was an excellent innovation for those who have mentally mislaid the
mastery of the classical languages they gained in schooldays. Here was
also a perfect device for those who never learned them, and they make a
somewhat larger crowd these days.

Despite the sense many of us have that the Loeb Classical Library
has always been there, it has in fact existed for only just under a
hundred years. The series was founded in 1911 by James Loeb, a
gentleman of parts who was both a classicist and a successful
businessman, and his goal was straightforwardly democratic in spirit:
To make the finest, most consequential literature of the classical
Greeks and Romans accessible, if not to the huddled masses exactly,
then certainly to the hundreds of thousands of an emerging educated
class whose schooling had not embraced the old classical curriculum
when they opted for the applied sciences or an earlier form of
Humanities Lite."

Read the whole thing here.