depends on what you mean by read, depends on how much time you have. read as in "eyes see every word?" read as in "understand enough to talk about it?" or read as in "fully understand?" if it's the latter, the Aristotle alone will take years. but if it's the first or the second, eh. you could do it in less than a decade if you have a spare thirty minutes a day. if you were really dedicated, like five years? again, depends how much time you want to sink into it. but why would you go for the loebs? they're shit translations, they're meant for people who are learning to read greek/latin. the translations are just cribs if you get stuck. far far better to get a range of translations for every writer or every work
and especially for the philosophy, you're just going to need to read shelves of secondary sources to pull anything of value from them. yeah, you could read plato's dialogues and feel very educated, but you probably didn't understand much.
For a normal person with work, responsibilities and so on I’d guess about one to three years depending on the person. Some of those are quick reads because they’re plays, and as the other anon pointed out they’re only half the length they appear to be because they’re bilingual.
These appear to be the majority of surviving Greek and latin texts from antiquity. I was wondering how many of these are fragments. I would imagine most of these have to only be fragments as so little survived.
Depends on what you mean by fragment. A lot of texts from antiquity might have gaps in the text, but not large gaps. Scholars will sometimes try to suggest and fill these gaps by using the context around what’s missing. Often times these gaps are very minimal. From a scholarly standpoint, a “fragment” is probably something more like some author quoted by a subsequent author where we don’t have the original text being quoted. This is often the case with pre-Socratic philosophy, where much of what we know about earlier philosophers comes from their work being quoted either in later philosophical texts or on funerary items found in people’s tombs. For texts like what’s published with Loeb, these are mostly intact works, not patchwork ones, as far as I know. I also think there are also probably a number of classical Latin works that haven’t been published by Loeb.
8 months ago
Anonymous
I mean there’s a volume of “comedic fragments.” I thought Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Sophocles and Euripides were the only surviving playwrights from ancient times. Not even Thespis has anything which survives.
Niche market and the kind of people interested in Latin and Greek probably aren’t minimum wage morons with no money. Ask yourself how many people you know who study either Latin or Greek and there’s your answer for why these aren’t paperback best sellers at $10 a copy. Only one book published in Latin has ever made it onto the New York Times bestseller list, and none in Greek as far as I know.
There's a Greek tragedian whose works only survived by alphabetical accident. As in, we have titles that start by say the letter R but all the rest is lost.
As someone else pointed out, green is Greek and red is Latin. The books come with the text in the original language on one page side and English on the other side.
Well I guess it depends on how you would define a good translation, but from what I remember people saying the translations aren't as good as some others that you could get, but at the same time they're not as important, since they're just meant to be a guideline for the less experienced reader for the Greek/Latin text on the page next to it.
Well I'd say that the translations, while not the best, are still serviceable. And the books themselves are of good quality, so If you can find them used or for cheap I'd still go for them. You never know, you just might want to start learning Greek a year from now, so why not future proof yourself if you can.
You have 1660 volumes of greek leobs and 491 latin leobs plus you have The I Tatti Renaissance Library for renaissance dual page latin works from Italy. Then you have Dumbarton oaks for greek, old English and latin dual page. Then you have murty classical indian library for dual page indian texts. So good luck anons.
Beach reads so like two months tops
depends on what you mean by read, depends on how much time you have. read as in "eyes see every word?" read as in "understand enough to talk about it?" or read as in "fully understand?" if it's the latter, the Aristotle alone will take years. but if it's the first or the second, eh. you could do it in less than a decade if you have a spare thirty minutes a day. if you were really dedicated, like five years? again, depends how much time you want to sink into it. but why would you go for the loebs? they're shit translations, they're meant for people who are learning to read greek/latin. the translations are just cribs if you get stuck. far far better to get a range of translations for every writer or every work
and especially for the philosophy, you're just going to need to read shelves of secondary sources to pull anything of value from them. yeah, you could read plato's dialogues and feel very educated, but you probably didn't understand much.
Aren't these bilingual books? So they're actually half as long?
the long ones are in multiple volumes. they are beautifully designed books
Yeah, Homer for example is in like four different volumes. The 500 books doesn’t seem as much as you would probably think taking that into account.
>they are beautifully designed books
But the translations are fricking horrible
Assuming you were proficient in both Greek and Latin how long would reading them all take?
I don't think anyone actually reads Ancient Greek fluently the same way they read in their native language
Yes.
For a normal person with work, responsibilities and so on I’d guess about one to three years depending on the person. Some of those are quick reads because they’re plays, and as the other anon pointed out they’re only half the length they appear to be because they’re bilingual.
These appear to be the majority of surviving Greek and latin texts from antiquity. I was wondering how many of these are fragments. I would imagine most of these have to only be fragments as so little survived.
Depends on what you mean by fragment. A lot of texts from antiquity might have gaps in the text, but not large gaps. Scholars will sometimes try to suggest and fill these gaps by using the context around what’s missing. Often times these gaps are very minimal. From a scholarly standpoint, a “fragment” is probably something more like some author quoted by a subsequent author where we don’t have the original text being quoted. This is often the case with pre-Socratic philosophy, where much of what we know about earlier philosophers comes from their work being quoted either in later philosophical texts or on funerary items found in people’s tombs. For texts like what’s published with Loeb, these are mostly intact works, not patchwork ones, as far as I know. I also think there are also probably a number of classical Latin works that haven’t been published by Loeb.
I mean there’s a volume of “comedic fragments.” I thought Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Sophocles and Euripides were the only surviving playwrights from ancient times. Not even Thespis has anything which survives.
Why are they so expensive?
Niche market and the kind of people interested in Latin and Greek probably aren’t minimum wage morons with no money. Ask yourself how many people you know who study either Latin or Greek and there’s your answer for why these aren’t paperback best sellers at $10 a copy. Only one book published in Latin has ever made it onto the New York Times bestseller list, and none in Greek as far as I know.
Look up the Oxford Classical Text prices on Amazon.
There's a Greek tragedian whose works only survived by alphabetical accident. As in, we have titles that start by say the letter R but all the rest is lost.
here is the secret - people don't read all those books instead they read the 3 page reviews
What do the different colors represent?
Blood and soil.
Very funny joke mr /misc/tard
Green= Greek works
Red= Latin works
What about the white ones with swastikas on the cover?
Marcus Aurelius was Greek?
Which language did he write in?
Latin is a vulgar language
No but he wrote in Greek.
As someone else pointed out, green is Greek and red is Latin. The books come with the text in the original language on one page side and English on the other side.
So are there actually any good translations among them?
Well I guess it depends on how you would define a good translation, but from what I remember people saying the translations aren't as good as some others that you could get, but at the same time they're not as important, since they're just meant to be a guideline for the less experienced reader for the Greek/Latin text on the page next to it.
That’s what I figured. So probably not worth getting if you aren’t learning Laing or Greek, right?
Well I'd say that the translations, while not the best, are still serviceable. And the books themselves are of good quality, so If you can find them used or for cheap I'd still go for them. You never know, you just might want to start learning Greek a year from now, so why not future proof yourself if you can.
You have 1660 volumes of greek leobs and 491 latin leobs plus you have The I Tatti Renaissance Library for renaissance dual page latin works from Italy. Then you have Dumbarton oaks for greek, old English and latin dual page. Then you have murty classical indian library for dual page indian texts. So good luck anons.
Decades if you read like 10 hours a day.
I want to read all the books in the series. That is a good goal to strive for.