Loeb Classical Library

The Loeb Classical Library is a series of books, today published by the Harvard University Press, which present 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.

The series was conceived and initially funded by James Loeb. The first volumes were published by William Heineman 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.) Profit from the editions continues to fund graduate student fellowships at Harvard University.

Although serious classicists sometimes sneer at the amateurish editions (which have only a minimal apparatus criticus), and others, conversely, are sometimes shocked by the relatively pedestrian prose style of the English translations (necessary because of the desire to remain as literal as possible), the Loeb editions are nonetheless ubiquitous.

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.

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 facing translation; it is bound similarly to the Loeb Classics, but with blue covers. (The books' dimensions, however, are slightly larger.)