Loeb Classical Library

The General Editor is Jeffrey Henderson, holder of the William Goodwin Aurelio Professorship of Greek Language and Literature at Boston University.

The first volumes were edited by Thomas Ethelbert Page, W. H. D. Rouse, and Edward Capps, and published by William Heinemann, Ltd. (London) in 1912, already in their distinctive green (for Greek text) and red (for Latin) hardcover bindings.

[6] In 1917 Virginia Woolf wrote (in The Times Literary Supplement): The Loeb Library, with its Greek or Latin on one side of the page and its English on the other, came as a gift of freedom.

As the command of Latin among generalist historians and archaeologists shrank in the course of the 20th century, professionals came increasingly to rely on these texts designed for amateurs.

As Birgitta Hoffmann remarked in 2001 of Tacitus' Agricola, "Unfortunately the first thing that happens in bilingual versions like the Loebs is that most of this apparatus vanishes and, if you use a translation, there is usually no way of knowing that there were problems with the text in the first place.

Greek (green) and Latin (red) volumes of the Loeb Classical Library in a London bookshop
Volume 170N of the Greek collection in the Loeb Classical Library, revised edition
Volume 6 of the Latin collection in the Loeb Classical Library, second edition 1988