Loeb at First Sight: The Classics Come in Red and Green (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Loeb at First Sight: The Classics Come in Red and Green (2013)

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31 pointsprismatic14 comments

These slim volumes are a joy to read precisely for the reasons given in the article: minimal textual flourish, old-fashioned translations, green and red colors, etc. as well their enormous breadth. I still remember the joy when my wife gifted me Procopius's On Buildings (https://www.loebclassics.com/view/LCL343/1940/volume.xml many years ago (and the guilty delight in reading his Anecdota later on: talk about an un-bowdlerized translation!). When you hold one, you feel you are a classicist, a feeling that cannot be easily described.

The only bad thing about the Loeb volumes are their price, they are generally $25-$30, which is steep for such small books. If I had a ton of money I would commission similar volumes subsidized to $10 max. For the starving student currently the only alternative is the Web, e.g. Textkit (https://www.textkit.com/greek-latin-forum/viewtopic.php?t=70...) and Perseus (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/collection?collection=Pe...)

I think the price is very fair, you pay for the quality and the experience. Especially now when, as you say, people who only want the text can use Perseus.

I actually remember buying a bunch of these on Amazon when Amazon was new, and being surprised at the low price.

Somewhat OT: Does anyone have any good recommendations on what to read next, chronologically speaking, after finishing Herodotus's Histories? I had in my mind to try out Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch. I'm interested in learning more about the rise of Hellenism, as well as anything related to Ptolemaic Egypt, since I know nothing about either. Herodotus has scratched an itch I never knew I had wrt. history

Chronologically, The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides makes most sense. It's a shift from the Greek-Persian conflict to Athens vs. Sparta.

You can read Plutarch's Lives in parallel (no pun intended), it's pure entertainment.

I think Thucydides is exactly what we read next in 1st semester Great Books.

Seconding the Thucydides recommendation, but check out the Landmark Ancient Histories editions of these books. You can also get Xenophon's Hellenika to follow that up, as he continues directly where Thucydides left off and goes up to the Theban triumph over Sparta.

Where Xenophon really shines though, is Anabasis, the story of his own campaigning. I have the Loeb version of this and it's good.

Landmark Ancient Histories also have an edition of Arrian's Alexander you may like, which would begin just a few decades after the end of Hellenika. I prefer this when they're available - they are very richly annotated with maps and other supplementary information to help you keep on track.

For Hellenism and Ptolemaic Egypt, Polybius is probably worth a shot. I can't think any other ancient writers that really go into detail on them.

This is exactly what I was looking for, thanks so much. Excited to get some good reading done this winter. Do you know of any other, non-ancient sources to look into for Hellenism/Ptolemaic Egypt?

Peter Green's Alexander to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age strikes me as very good. It should keep you reading through a long winter (600 pages before the notes). Green wrote a shorter book on Hellenistic history and culture also, but I haven't read it.

Love Loebs but I'm a little sad I first read Hesiod and a few others in these translations first. There's something endearing about the rather academic, literal versions but having since read others and seen the value of a good translator, I wish I could go back and read them for the first time understanding in something approaching the fluidity and tone of the originals.

Another thing, you know something is a classic when you can sell the same book for a century and still never find a cheap copy anywhere! I feel like I never see Loebs below $10 unless they're trashed and noted up.

Ugh I have had nothing but poor experiences with Loebs, at least for Roman authors. It is quite a feat to make Tacitus sound like some flowery and long-winded 19th century academic, but they pulled it off somehow. Reading it in the original Latin several years later, I was pleasantly surprised by his unadorned clarity and conciseness

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the whole point of the Loeb books that the original is right there on the facing page, so that both the original Greek/Latin and the English translation can be read together? I guess in principle the translation could be read independently, ignoring the original (and that's what it seems you're saying you did), but just from the format of the Loeb books I've always thought of the translation as some sort of helper/guide best consumed along with the source text.

Yeah at the time I read the English translation, I was just starting to learn Latin and had only the most basic proficiency.

Is this a regional thing? I ask because this seems like something I should have heard of -- my family had the 54 volume "Great Books of the Western World" on our shelves, I took two semesters of Great Books in college, frequent bookstores wherever I go, etc. -- but I can't recall ever hearing of this series before.

My librarian wife tells me she has bought some of them for the public library, so I guess it's just a weird gap in my own knowledge and not a "nobody in Michigan has heard of these" thing.

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