Before the dramatic expansion of Penguin Classics, it was almost impossible to find a translation of anything in Latin or Greek. Schoolboys were reduced to furtively ordering Brodies or Kelly’s Keys from the local bookshop.
The great exception was the Loeb Classical Library. This was a series sponsored by James Loeb, a Harvard-educated American banker who loved classics and the arts and had amassed a fortune before retiring to Munich in 1905 to seek relief from his continuing psychiatric problems. He was persuaded to endow a foundation to publish the surviving texts of all Greek and Latin, with translation. The first volumes appeared in autumn 1912. Loeb died in 1933, emblazoned with honorary degrees.
Since this series obviously made life far too easy for schoolboys, Loebs were kept out of the school library, presumably for the use of Sir alone in the privacy of his own bedroom. To find the relevant Loeb in the public library was therefore to experience a frisson more powerful than anything delivered by Tit-bits. The tradition is maintained. To this day the wonderful Lit and Phil Library in Newcastle has the complete Loeb series, but not on the open shelves. They are kept in the librarian’s room.
Like everyone else at the time, the editors had problems with organs. At the slightest hint of genitals, for example, the translation would bowdlerise, omit, or repeat the text of the original (another enlightening Tit-bits moment for the youthful scholar, accompanied by feverish scrambling through the dictionary). In his Martial: Epigrams (1919), Walter Ker left the obscenities in the Italian of the translation by Giuspanio Graglia (1782 and 1791). But there was still one no-go area, even for Italians: cunno appeared as c— o.
The Loeb series is nearing its 500th edition.
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