Sunday, June 3, 2012

PDFs of the Loeb Classical Library...for FREE!


The hot news this weekend among classicists in the Twittersphere and on Facebook is  that all out of copyright editions of the Loeb Classical Library texts are available for free at Loebolus. You can download individual texts or a zip file of them all.

For those who don't know, the Loeb Classical Library is a series of translations of ancient Greek and Latin texts. Harvard University Press (HUP) has been publishing Loebs since 1911 and they have a nice account of their history here. The series includes texts ranging in date from Homer's Iliad and Odyssey in the 8th century B.C. to the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation in the 8th century A.D. Each volume includes an authoritative edition of the original text on the left page and an English translation on the facing page. They are easily recognizable by their green and red covers.

Since 1990, HUP has been updating their translations. The older translations, which are available at Loebolus, often seem rather out of date and some of the texts were bowdlerized to remove potentially offensive material. This is especially obvious in authors like Aristophanes and Catullus who often used sexually explicit language.
Still the older versions of Loebs are a great resource for anyone wanting to read an ancient Greek or Latin text in translation or the original.

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