Hugh Lloyd-Jones, editor & translator Sophocles.
Vol. 1: Ajax, Electra, Oedipus Tyrannus. 483 pages, $19.95.
Vol. 2: Antigone, The Women of Trachis, Philoctetes, Oedipus at Colonus. 599 pages, $19.95.
Loeb Classical Library/ Harvard University Press
reviewed by Donald Lyons
“Some things were current once that are current no longer. A public for an inexpensive bilingual Dante—Italian text, notes, and a facing version in unpretentious prose… . It was not presumed that the reader knew Italian, but that, possessing some acquaintance with Latin or one of the Romance languages, he would welcome a prose guide to the very words of the master in the original.” Hugh Kenner, writing here about the early years of the century, had his eye on the J. M. Dent edition of Dante but might as appropriately have instanced the Loeb Classical Library. The Loebs, published by Harvard for eighty-odd years, boast of being the only series to give access, in facing translations from Greek and Latin, to “all that is important in Greek and Latin literature.” (In some deep Rimbaldian color sense, Greek is forever green and Latin red to those reared on Loebs.) The Loebs, and editions like them, became a lifelong resource for an educated public wishing to keep in touch with writings that had nourished them in their salad days but that were written in languages the continuing study of which had not proved possible in their adult lives.
One drawback, however, to the civilizing potency of the Loebs
