When launched in 1911, the Loeb Classical Library was an altogether new type of publishing venture. Its founder and first patron, the businessman and amateur philologist James Loeb (1867–1933), envisioned editions of ancient Greek and Latin texts with English translations on facing pages. The series’s aim was to make the whole corpus of Greco-Roman literature available to as wide a readership as possible, especially readers with a basic (but non-specialist) knowledge of Greek or Latin. Virginia Woolf, reviewing one of the early Loebs in 1917, approved this democratic goal, welcoming the project as a “gift of freedom” for the “open and unabashed amateur.” Ordinary readers, she declared, should “make up our minds that we shall never be independent of our Loeb.”

More than a century on, Woolf’s pronouncement seems vindicated. The series is still very much with us; even many of us non-amateurs would not wish to be without our Loeb. Until fairly recently, however, many classical scholars did not view the series so favorably. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1848–1931), the dominant German philologist of the era, opposed the idea for reasons that later critics have echoed. In correspondence with Loeb, Wilamowitz worried that readers would be distracted from the original texts and “hypnotized” by the translation on the facing page. At the time, translation was also not felt to be the serious scholar’s business. The proper focus of classical philology was above all the methodical reconstitution of Greek and Latin texts, and Wilamowitz complained that Loebs would cut into the market for more-scholarly editions. In effect the Loeb, a book for amateurs (as Woolf recognized), was not seen as a book either by or for scholars. The uneven quality of the series in its first decades did not help its case.

Today, the Loeb’s standing is much stronger. From the 1980s on, improvements under the editors G. P. Goold and Jeffrey Henderson steadily enhanced the series’s quality and reputation. The weakest entries of the old catalogue have been replaced, other volumes have been revised and updated, and the library continues to add new titles every year. Loebs increasingly serve both as a showcase of Anglophone scholarship and as something like a version of record, a convenient first-stop orientation to texts, their interpretation, and further reading. Still, today’s Loeb has not abandoned the “unabashed amateur” for whom it was envisioned: in many respects, refinements have rendered the Loeb truer to its founding mission than before. If Woolf was excited by the series’s promise in 1917, then she would heartily approve its more recent offerings.

Readers can approach a Loeb either left-to-right or right-to-left: that is, keeping one’s eyes on the original text with an occasional peek at the facing translation, or reading the English while spot-checking the Greek or Latin. Both approaches presuppose a physical book—a basic fact reflected in the series’s distinctive design and exceptional production quality. All Loebs are cloth-bound with signature jackets, color-coded green (Greek) and red (Latin). A digital counterpart to the series was launched in 2014, but its avowed purpose is to supplement rather than replace the physical books: Henderson, the current editor, states that “the print Library will continue to serve the purposes best served by the codex, of which the Loeb volumes have long been a beautiful and exceptional variety.”

Plato is well represented in the series, which has begun updating its Plato volumes from the 1910s to ’30s with new editions. The original Loeb Plato comprises twelve volumes, of which four have so far been replaced: Paul Shorey’s two-volume Republic (1930); translations of Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, and Phaedrus by Harold North Fowler (1914); and the Symposium, Lysis, and Gorgias of Walter Lamb (1925). These remain fine volumes, especially by the spotty standard of early Loebs, but all have long since begun to show their age, especially as repositories of scholarship. The successor volumes are edited by the English team of William Preddy and Chris Emlyn-Jones (henceforth pej), whose translation is tailored to a facing-page format. The new editors

operate on the assumption that our readers are interested in being able to refer across from translation to text (or from text to translation) . . . . We therefore attempt to keep closer to the Greek than the average standalone translation, consistent with clarity of meaning and acceptable English style.

In other words, un-hypnotic by design.

The biggest differences appear in the new volumes’ supplementary materials. The old Plato editions, like most early Loebs, tended to squeeze as much text as could fit between two covers, keeping commentary to a minimum. (This lack of scholarly annotation was another point of complaint from Wilamowitz.) New Loebs, however, supply better aids: substantial introductory essays, reviews of major interpretive questions, and frequent notes to the translation. A case in point is pej’s first volume. The four dialogues dealing with Socrates’ trial and execution—Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo—fill 523 pages in this edition; by contrast, Fowler’s volume stuffed the same material onto 402 pages.¹ (It also shoehorned in an additional fifth dialogue, the Phaedrus, which the new series transfers to another volume.) The new edition’s length is due mainly to expanded commentary. Fowler’s volume includes only a perfunctory eleven-page introduction by his fellow editor Walter Lamb. The replacement, by contrast, features a wide-ranging thirty-six-page introduction covering topics that range from Plato’s literary models (his dialogues seem, at least initially, to have been patterned after an existing genre of sôkratikoi logoi or short discourses incorporating Socrates as a character) to the non-Platonic evidence for Socrates’ life (the testimony of Aristophanes and Xenophon and a biography by Diogenes Laërtius).

Throughout, pej urge appreciation of Plato’s literary art, regularly drawing attention to the fictional settings and narrative structure of individual dialogues. There are concise but substantive discussions of cultural and historical background: the elite banquet (for Symposium), the Athenian legal and political systems (for Apology), and so forth. (Once in passing, the editors rather puzzlingly describe Athens as “the nearest thing to a democracy” in classical Greece.) Greek words in Platonic dialogue often slide back and forth between technical and everyday meanings, and pej are careful to translate such words with sensitivity to context (especially when they are used in nontechnical ways): thus, for instance, epistêmê is sometimes translatable as “knowledge” or “understanding,” but at other times assumes the technical sense of “science”; eidos, which later becomes a word for Plato’s metaphysical “Forms,” sometimes refers only to a “characteristic” of something; and the troublesome daimôn, which usually means a god or divine being, is translated as “spirit” when it describes the divine voice that urges Socrates to pursue philosophical questioning.

The editions of Lamb and Fowler, though fine in their own right, have clearly been improved upon. The replacement of Paul Shorey’s Republic is a loss more keenly felt. Shorey (1857–1934) was one of the few American classicists of his day who could stand toe-to-toe with his counterparts across the Atlantic. (Not many of his contemporaries, in America or anywhere, would have had the nerve, as Shorey did, to dismiss Wilamowitz’s Platon of 1919 as a mere “historical novel.”) Shorey is known today for his uncompromisingly “unitarian” view of Plato. Many classical scholars, then and now, have challenged the unity of Plato’s work, arguing that the dialogues reflect changes in his views across different periods of his life (especially regarding the so-called Theory of Forms) or identifying contradictory parts within individual texts (proposing, for instance, that the first and last books of the Republic were composed separately from the dialogue’s middle portion). Shorey had no patience for such speculations. Instead, he argued forcefully that the main outlines of Plato’s thought took their mature shape early on, and that any apparent inconsistencies across his body of work are primarily due to literary considerations—that is, the topics, fictional contexts, and dramatis personae of individual dialogues. This approach, summed up in What Plato Said (1933), was in some ways ahead of its time: though few classicists today subscribe to Shorey’s strict unitarianism, the importance of dialogue format and narrative technique in Plato’s work is now widely recognized. Shorey would, I think, have concurred with pej that “the dialogues . . . are intended to be performed, if only in the mind of the listener/reader.”

Shorey’s Republic of 1930 is a gem. I am aware of no other Loeb that so visibly bears the imprint of a great scholar’s mind and personality. The prefatory essay, unlike the brief and forgettable front matter of most early Loebs, offers thirty-nine pages of elbow-throwing opinionation that still make for fun reading. As might be expected, Shorey heaps scorn on contemporaries who challenged the unity of Plato’s magnum opus on flimsy pretexts. “[I]t is the height of naïveté,” he writes, “for philological critics who have never themselves composed any work of literary art to schoolmaster such creations by their own a priori canons of the logic and architectonic unity of composition”: no intelligent reader could permit “minor disproportions and irrelevancies” to obscure the “total impression of the unity and designed convergence” of the dialogue’s construction. Shorey’s crisp translation hews close to the Greek, often with keener precision and in brighter colors than present-day English can manage. His commentary deals incisively with interpretive tangles while frequently addressing Plato’s place in the wider tradition: he engages (in several languages) such disparate authorities as Augustine, Chaucer, Montesquieu, Emerson, and Herbert Spencer with equal facility.

Perhaps inevitably, pej’s Republic is more modest.² While the retirement of Shorey’s edition is regrettable, its successor is a strong contribution to the current series. The new edition is informative but undogmatic. The introduction, for instance, offers the reader a fair-minded survey of critical approaches to the Republic ranging from the Renaissance to Karl Popper and Leo Strauss without putting a finger on the scale. If pej show any overall tendency in their commentary, it is toward underscoring the dialogue’s polyphonic complexity: their proposal is that the Republic is “essentially exploratory, reflecting the hesitations, uncertainties, and changes of direction of [the] main character, Socrates, as well as the agreements and doubts of his interlocutors.”

In the Republic, Socrates and his companions (chiefly Plato’s brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus) develop a famous thought experiment: an imaginary city, as well-ordered as possible, is constructed in speech as an analogue for the just soul. The city mirrors the condition of the individual soul, first in its state of perfect kingship and then in its decline through oligarchy, democracy, and finally tyranny. Each corrupt constitution is found to correspond to a corrupt type of soul.

The discussion of the ideal city is undertaken at first in order to understand the soul, but the “beautiful city” (Kallipolis) quickly assumes a life of its own. It is a perennial question how far, if at all, Plato intended the “city in speech” as a real political program rather than strictly as a metaphor for the soul. The dialogue is ambiguous on this point. Certainly there is interaction between the civic and psychic levels: Socrates even claims that the most unjust soul can only come about in the man who becomes a tyrant in real life. Ultimately, though, Socrates and his interlocutors seem to conclude that the ideal city, with its ruling caste of incorruptible philosophers, is unrealizable in this world. Even so, he says (in pej’s rendering),

perhaps there’s a model up in heaven for anyone willing to look and if he sees it, found himself on it. But it makes no difference whether it exists anywhere or will do. You see, he’d only involve himself in its affairs, not those of anywhere else.

The crucial verb for the philosopher’s action is katoikizein, which usually means to “settle” or “colonize” a place. It is difficult to translate here, as the new and old Loebs both remark. Shorey’s rendering, “constitute himself its citizen,” stresses that the philosopher’s home can only be within Kallipolis. The translation of pej, “found himself on it,” better captures the verb’s ambiguity: the individual soul’s conversion to philosophy is identical with the “founding” of the city in speech, and the images of city and soul collapse into one. The philosopher, lacking a real Kallipolis, must make a city of himself. Both translations capture the philosopher’s ironic relation to political life. The state governed by philosopher-kings, which is the philosopher’s true home, cannot be realized; it follows that the real city, where the philosopher dwells, is one where he can never fully belong. At the same time, the final recusal from the political domain sharpens the dialogue’s importance for the philosophically minded reader. Few of us will ever have opportunity to rule a city: but each of us must perforce govern his own soul, and it is within every man’s choice to do so as king or as tyrant.

Plato’s antipathy toward “the poets” is a critical commonplace. Is this view accurate, though? Socrates expels the epic and dramatic poets from Kallipolis in Republic 2, and subsequently in Republic 10 (on different grounds) finds imitative art incompatible with philosophy. As pej stress, though, poetry’s role in Plato’s thought is not always consistent:

Throughout the dialogue Plato’s attitude to poetry varies from between a degree of acceptance of its value and function, undercut by criticism and on occasion a degree of irony . . . and more or less outright dismissal.

Across the dialogues, Socrates constantly quotes and alludes to well-known poets—Homer, Hesiod, Sappho, Anacreon, Simonides, Pindar, and the tragedians—both as authorities and as touchstones of shared culture with his conversation partners. In the Phaedo, he even takes to composing verses as a hobby while awaiting execution. It should be clear, then, that the “expulsion” of the poets in the Republic is not a straightforward proposal. Rather, this exclusion wraps the dialogue’s central discussion within a veil of unreality, where its psycho-political experiment can unfold unencumbered by traditional authorities or practical constraints.

There is an element of rivalry, too, in the Republic’s poetic throwdown. Nietzsche, in his 1872 essay “Homer’s Contest,” cannily recognized that the competitive one-upmanship that animated all Greek poetic art also lay at the heart of Plato’s challenge to the poets and other verbal artists. The artistry of Plato’s dialogues, claimed Nietzsche, itself grew out of

a contest with the art of the orators, the sophists, the dramatists of the time, contrived so that he at last could say: “Look! I, too, can do what my great rivals can do, and I can do it better than they. . . . And now I discard all that entirely and pass sentence on all imitative art! The contest alone made me into a poet, a sophist, an orator!”

Ancient tradition, be it noted, even credited Plato as the poetic author of some thirty epigrams in the Greek Anthology. The mythical afterlife is a special focus in this contest with the authority of poetic tradition. In Republic 3, Socrates singles out traditional representations of the underworld for criticism, and four of his major dialogues—Phaedo, Gorgias, Phaedrus, and the Republic itself—culminate in elaborate stories of the soul’s postmortem existence that rank among Plato’s own most overtly “poetic” creations.

The newest Loeb Plato volume contains his three so-called erotic dialogues: Lysis, Symposium, and Phaedrus.³ The collocation of these texts in a single volume is in itself an improvement on the earlier Loebs. As pej emphasize, the three dialogues, though united by their interest in erotic love, differ markedly in their dramatic settings. In the Lysis, Socrates recounts a short and inconclusive philosophical discussion with a group of youths in the public context of a palaistra or wrestling school; the Symposium, narrated by a third party named Apollodorus, envisions a banquet of Athenian celebrities who offer competing speeches about Eros; and the Phaedrus, which has no external narrator, conjures a vivid landscape just outside the city walls as the staging area for a wide-ranging one-on-one conversation between Socrates and a young aficionado of rhetoric. In these as in other dialogues, the staging shapes the arguments that unfold.

The Athenian practice of pederasty also furnishes crucial background for all three dialogues—a fact which, for modern readers, takes some getting used to. In early Greek literature, what we might call “romantic” love was explored not through marriage plots or courtship stories, but in homoerotic relationships. Marriage was, on the whole, thought of in practical terms as the means for producing legitimate offspring and passing on property rather than as something to be pursued for love. Since it was believed that everyone was susceptible of attraction to members of either sex, homosexual relationships were the main context in which men might expect to experience romantic love with someone of equal social status (as opposed to noncitizen women or prostitutes). Such relationships were normally not between partners of the same age. In Athens, at least among the upper classes, it was customary for a thirty- or forty-something “lover” (erastês) to pursue a teenage “beloved” (erômenos). Pederastic etiquette called for the two to adopt respective roles as pursuer and pursued, and more generally as “active” and “passive” partners—in more senses, shall we say, than the strictly grammatical.

Such are the rather foreign cultural parameters that bound Plato’s discussions of erotic love. Fowler and Lamb pass over the dialogues’ social background with hardly any comment; their translations often mention love of “boys,” but the nature of the pederastic relationship is never directly explained. Here pej are less squeamish, offering a clear and factual discussion of the issue in their introduction to the volume and wherever relevant throughout the text. They also stress that Athenian pederasty was quite unlike homosexuality in the modern sense; indeed, on this point and others, pej rightly warn against reading Plato through the distorting lens of our own culture wars.

The new volume’s frankness yields intriguing dividends. Perhaps the most interesting thread that emerges from reading the pederastic dialogues alongside each other in pej’s version is the conceptual tension between the active and passive aspects of erotic love—or, put differently, between Eros as subject and as object. This thread begins already in the Lysis, thought to be one of Plato’s earlier works, in which Socrates inquires about the ambiguity of the Greek philos and related words: the same root can designate someone as “beloved” (philoi means “loved ones”) but may equally denote a “lover” of something else (as, for instance, philosophos means “lover of wisdom”). In the Lysis, this line of investigation ends at an impasse; but the problem resurfaces in the Symposium, where the foregrounding of pederastic themes heightens the tension between the subjective and objective character of Eros. The first several symposiasts’ speeches all privilege the perspective of the erastês, the “active” lover: adopting this point of view, various speakers describe erotic love as a mode of health (Eryximachus), a means of realizing one’s own nature (Aristophanes), or a source of poetic inspiration (Agathon). Socrates’ speech, by contrast, marks a shift in the dialogue’s direction: his interest is not with the perspective of the erastês but with the “object” of Eros. At the heart of the dialogue, it seems, is a choice between different forms of pederastic logic: on the one hand, a quasi-therapeutic interpretation of erotic passion in terms of its benefits for the person who experiences it; and, on the other, an understanding of sexual love as directed fundamentally outward toward the beautiful beloved—and ultimately, Socrates wants us to believe, toward Beauty itself.

Socrates’ argument is undermined, however, by the inconclusive note on which the dialogue ends. Just after Socrates finishes speaking, a drunken Alcibiades gate-crashes the proceedings. Alcibiades was the most notorious of the ill-behaved young aristocrats whose association with Socrates damaged the latter’s reputation in Athens. Alcibiades’ impromptu speech recapitulates aspects of Socrates’ discourse about Eros in an ironic key. He semi-comically recounts his inappropriate “pursuit” of the older Socrates, as well as Socrates’ (to all appearances unsuccessful) attempt to divert Alcibiades’ lustful attention toward a philosophical life. For pej, the last word given to Alcibiades in the dialogue implies a pessimism toward Socrates’ vision of Eros as an inducement to philosophy. The example of Alcibiades, on their reading, gives a warning that the mystical ascent toward the Beautiful is bound to go badly when a dubious character like Alcibiades gets involved.

The erotic dialogues put a spotlight on a question that lurks in the scenery of many Platonic dialogues: Why should one pursue philosophy in the first place? What is the fuel that sets the philosophical engine in motion? Several of Plato’s dialogues touch on this question, pointing toward different possible answers. In the Apology, Socrates presents his pursuit of wisdom as a divine calling that overrides his obligations to other authorities. As he awaits execution in the Phaedo, the discussion about the immortality of the soul gains urgency from the imminence of Socrates’ own death and his friends’ anxiety about his postmortem fate. Implicit also is the question of whether the enterprise of philosophy can or should carry on once Socrates has gone. In the end, it is not the promise of immortality that proves the strongest pull toward philosophy, but the example of Socrates in the hour of his death. His trial and execution serve to warn readers of the risks involved in philosophical inquiry; just as importantly, however, Socrates himself becomes a virtuous model that his followers wish to emulate.

The pederastic dialogues point to a further motive behind the philosophical life. In these texts, Eros emerges as philosophy’s propulsive element, the fuel that powers the whole human machinery toward its true object. Here again is a difference from the Republic, where the erotic and appetitive part of the soul corresponds to the city’s lowest social caste; that dialogue’s later books dwell on the danger posed by sexual and other bodily desires as impediments to would-be philosophers. The Symposium and Phaedrus, however, offer a different perspective. In his pursuit of the Beautiful itself, the lover of wisdom is pushed forward by Eros in his most authentic form. Philosophy cannot compel: it must seduce. The dialogues intimate that philosophy’s ultimate objects are not to be grasped with logical proofs, but approached with imagination to rival the poets and desire akin to the stirrings of love.