Antiquity Bound: The Loeb Classical Library as Middlebrow Culture in the Early

Twentieth Century
Author(s): Kevin B. Sheets
Source: The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Apr., 2005, Vol. 4, No. 2
(Apr., 2005), pp. 149-171
Published by: Society for Historians of the Gilded Age & Progressive Era

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25144394

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Antiquity Bound: The Loeb Classical
Library as Middlebrow Culture in the
Early Twentieth Century1
by Kevin B. Sheets, SUNY Cortland

Armed with volumes of Greek and Latin classics, James Loeb waged a
gentleman's war. He took aim at what the modern world prized and with
the ammunition of antiquity he sought to defeat it. Specifically, in 1912, he
inaugurated the publication of his eponymous classical library of ancient
texts and facing-page English translations. The Loeb Classical Library,
numbering in the hundreds of volumes, collected into one series all the im
portant works and many obscure texts from antiquity. With the same popu
larizing instinct that guided other purveyors of middlebrow culture, Loeb
aimed to connect a general audience with its classical heritage.2 With his set
of compact green and red volumes whose publication he funded, Loeb saw
himself as a warrior in the centuries-long battle between the ancients and
the moderns.
Loeb's nostalgia for the ancient world shaped his philanthropic project in
democratic culture. He romanticized antiquity because he saw among the
ancients virtues that the modern world had denigrated. By popularizing the
classics, he hoped to counter the drift of modern society, restoring those
characteristics nineteenth-century men identified as part of the genteel tra
dition. Indeed, Loeb was a product of a Victorian sensibility. He thought of
literature as ennobling. In this way, his romantic effort to popularize the
classics in the twentieth century suggests that the genteel tradition persisted
long after historians typically date its end.3 He appealed to an audience of

*I would like to thank Laura Gathagun, Louis Hamilton, the editor, and the two anony
mous readers for their careful attention to an early draft of this essay. Their helpful com
ments pushed my thinking in new directions. All citations from Houghton Library collec
tions are by permission of the Houhgton Library, Harvard University.
2Joan Shelley Rubin identified the efforts of certain popularizers of highbrow culture in
her book The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill, 1992). While she does not discuss
Loeb, his library parallels in meaningful ways those projects she does describe.
3Many historians have identified a break in the early twentieth century between a Victo
rian world and what they have called the "modern" world. While dating this break is impre
cise, the rupture occurred either before or immediately after World War I depending on the
cause these various historians identify. Among intellectual historians, the best representative
is Henry May, The End of American Innocence (New York, 1959). More recent discussions of
the birth of the modern in the early twentieth century include Christine Stansell, American
Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York, 2000) and Lynn
Dumenil The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s (New York, 1995).
Joseph Kett's book on self-education in American history makes the claim that the genteel

Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 4:2 (April 2005)

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 150 Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era / April 2005

similar souls who embraced the ideal of self-culture. Loeb's volumes at

tempted to kindle in modern men and women sympathy for the ancient
world, a cultural inheritance packaged for retail.
As an effort to popularize the works of antiquity, the Loeb series is akin
to other projects in middlebrow culture described by Joan Shelley Rubin.
Like the Book-of-the-Month Club, begun in 1926, Will Durant's Story of
Philosophy published in 1926, and John Erskine's Great Books venture popu
larized in the 1920s, the Loeb Classical Library was inspired by a similar
motive. Promoters of middlebrow packaged highbrow culture in ways that
made it accessible and palatable to a middling audience of educated con
sumers. Critics often scoffed that these efforts cheapened culture. They
missed the point. Loeb and others opened an audience for literature, phi
losophy, and the classics that might otherwise have gone untapped. More
over, Loeb devoted his fortune to cultural philanthropy rather than to the
self-indulgent display common among his wealthy peers.

The Man Behind the Books

Loeb's romance with antiquity may have come from his genteel upbring
ing. Born in 1867, the second son of German-born Jews, Loeb demon
strated a talent and a sympathy for the arts, and in particular music, a favor
ite of his mother. His childhood was spent in New York where his father,
Solomon Loeb, was a founding partner in the banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb
and Co. The family's Murray Hill home was filled with the bric-a-brac of
the genteel tradition. His father, while known for his rigid bearing and prac
ticality, nevertheless sketched and collected paintings, especially those of the
Barbizon School and other works of German artists. His mother, Betty,
whom he called Oma, assembled her children on Sunday mornings to en
tertain her in the family's "Pompeian music room." Loeb became an ac
complished cellist. His education began with the classical training he re
ceived at the Julius Sachs Collegiate Institute in New York, then Harvard,
where he graduated in 1888. By the time he left Harvard to join his father's
firm, he was a committed classicist and budding member of the genteel tradition4

tradition was "in shambles" by 1910. See The Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties: From Self
Improvement to Adult Education in America, 1750-1990 (Stanford, 1994). Loeb's project and
those of other middlebrow advocates, however, suggests continuity. Many continued to
think of culture in terms of the genteel tradition long after it was supposed to have been
eclipsed by the avant-garde.
4Biographical information about Loeb and his immediate family comes from a number of
sources. Standard biographical dictionaries were helpful in constructing the narrative of
Loeb's life. See Dictionary of American Biography, vol. 21 supplement 1 (New York, 1944), 503
04 and The Biographical Dictionary of North American Classicists (Westport, 1994), 368-70. Obitu
aries were also helpful. See for example, the notices in the following: "Obituary Note," The
Publishers' Weekly 123 (June 10, 1933): 1887; The Times (of London), June 2, 1933 and The

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 Sheets / Antiquity Bound 151

James Loeb, ca. 1888, about the time of his Harvard graduation. Call #HUP Loeb, James
(1). Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.

His niece, Frieda Warburg, remembered Loeb's "vivid, brilliant personal

ity." He was "as handsome as a Greek god," she said. "He charmed every
one, was an excellent scholar, a fine musician and an esthete in the best
sense of the word."5 These scholarly and aesthetic inclinations fitted him
poorly for the work of banking. Indeed, he had hoped to pursue a scholar
ship to study Egyptology in Europe rather than enter the family's firm. But
James' older brother Morris had successfully escaped the family business so
Solomon fixed his gaze on his second son.6

Times, June 3, 1933. Loeb's niece left a memoir that provided rich insight into the Loeb fam
ily. See Frieda Schiff Warburg, Reminiscences of a Long Ufe (New York, 1956), 11-19 passim.
For Loeb's family circle see Ron Chernow, The Warburgs: The Twentieth-Century Odyssey of a
Remarkable Jewish Family (New York, 1993), and Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great
Jewish Families of New York (New York, 1967). Kuhn, Loeb and Company published a com
memorative history of the firm celebrating its eighty-eighth year in business. See Investment
Banking Through Four Generations (New York, 1955).
5Warburg, Reminiscences of a Long Life, 19.
6Chernow, The Warburgs, 11, and Birmingham, Our Crowd, 254.

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 152 Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era / April 2005

His was an unhappy tenure at Kuhn, Loeb and Co. Already taking the
lead of the firm was James' brother-in-law Jacob Schiff, a man Loeb did not
particularly like. It became clear to James that Schiff s own son Morti was
the heir apparent at Kuhn, Loeb, a fate that probably relieved James more
than it troubled him. When Solomon died in 1901, James retired. The os
tensible reason was his poor health, a plausible claim given the periodic
bouts of incapacitating depression he was to suffer.
Free from the burdens of banking, Loeb devoted his energies to philan
thropy and to the scholarly life he had wanted. He amassed an important
collection of Tanagra sculptures. Reflecting his and his mother's devotion
to music, he founded and endowed the American Institute of Musical Art,
later Juilliard. To honor one of his favorite professors at Harvard, he estab
lished in 1902 the Charles Eliot Norton travelling fellowship to fund Har
vard students' trips to the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.
He endowed other scholarships for Harvard students, contributed money
to erect a music building and a physical sciences laboratory. Harvard's li
brary and art museum benefited from his generosity; so too did the univer
sity's classics department. To maintain the Loeb Classical Library after his
death, he established an endowment to support its continued publication.
The scale and scope of his philanthropy suggest the range of his interests.
In addition to his lavish cultural patronage, he channeled his funds to medi
cal research and health care. He was a founder of a convalescent home in
New York named for his parents. In Germany, where he retired in 1905, he
gave to the Jewish Nurses' home and provided funds for the expansion of
the Murnau Hospital in Bavaria. Significantly, he helped to found in 1911
the German Institute for Psychiatric Research.7
This latter organization had special meaning for him. Like his sister Guta
and his older brother Morris, James suffered from bouts of depression.
Both he and Guta experienced nervous breakdowns. Morris, a respected
professor of chemistry at New York University, was absorbed by phobias
of all sorts. At least one, however, his consuming fear of food poisoning,
proved prophetic. Eating a bad oyster in 1912 killed him. James's own men
tal health concerns led him to Sigmund Freud in 1906. He spent the rest of
his life secluded on his estate, Hochreid, in the Bavarian town of Murnau.
He lived with his wife, a nurse who had attended him during a particularly
severe depression, and her son from another marriage. Loeb had no chil
dren of his own.8
His philanthropy and his life's work were shaped by several decisive in

7These details were compiled from the sources listed in note 4.

8Chernow, The Warburgs, 77-80.

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 Sheets / Antiquity Bound 153

fluences. His family was connected to other prominent German-Jewish

families in New York and in Europe. He was related by marriage to the
Warburgs, the Schiffs, and the Seligmans. The wealth of Loeb's brother-in
law, Jacob Schiff, rivaled J. P. Morgan's vast fortune. Both his niece and a
sister married into the Warburg family; in fact, they married the Warburg
brothers Paul and Felix. Paul Warburg was an important ally to the Loeb
Classical Library, keeping it afloat during one of James's extended illnesses.
These connections put James in touch with a transatlantic community of
affluent and powerful individuals.
As Ron Chernow and Stephen Birmingham suggest, families such as the
Loebs identified themselves more as Germans than as Jews.9 His family's
agnosticism may have nurtured in James a cultural, more than a religious
interest in Judaism. His early retirement to Germany and his strident de
fense of his ancestral land during World War I suggest where his sympa
thies rested. His secularism was common among co-religionists. Walter
Lippmann, a fellow German Jew, submerged his Jewishness and chastised
the particularism of American Zionists. Many, including Lippmann and
Loeb, felt more comfortable in a secular and classical tradition, embracing
the "cosmopolitanism" popular among the progressive intelligentsia in the
early twentieth century.
Still, Loeb's removal to Germany made him a peripheral figure to the
crowd of "free thinking" or "liberated" Jewish intellectuals David Hollinger
describes. These figures included German Jews such as Lippmann, but also
the more recently arrived Russian and Eastern European Jews like Morris
Cohen and Joseph Freeman. Together they embraced a cosmopolitan ideal
that differed from the pluralism of Horace Kallen whose views gave space
to ethnic, religious, and cultural particularism. Loeb, it may be said, would
have sympathized with Freeman's desire to see himself as part of a broadly
humanistic western tradition. From the comforts of Hochreid, Loeb pro
moted the same cause with his library of classical Greek and Roman texts.10

^he Loebs were like many established German Jewish families in America who sought to
distance themselves from the more recently arrived Eastern European and Russian Jews. On
the Loebs' agnosticism, see Chernow, The Warburgs, 55 and Birmingham, Our Crowd, 175.
Birmingham relates the anecdote of Loeb's mother telling her children to avoid running to
the subway door as the train was stopping lest others think that they were "pushy Jews." See
page 291.
10This and the preceding paragraph draws on a number of secondary sources that de
scribe the careers of Jewish Americans in the early twentieth century. In addition to Cher
now, The Warburgs and Birmingham, Our Crowd, see Ronald Steel's magisterial biography,
Walter Lippmann and the American Century (New York, 1980), 186-96 and David A. Hollinger,
"Ethnic Diversity, Cosmopolitanism, and the Emergence of the American Liberal Intelli
gentsia," in In the American Province: Studies in the History and Historiography of Ideas (Baltimore,
1985), esp. 58-66.

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 154 Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era / April 2005

A more powerful and persistent influence on Loeb was his association

with Charles Eliot Norton. While an undergraduate at Harvard, Loeb fell
under the spell of Norton, the first professor of art history in America.11
The son of Andrews Norton, the prominent Unitarian minister, Norton
was a central figure among the New England literati and was friendly with
many of the leading intellectuals in Europe, including John Ruskin, Thomas
Carlyle, and Matthew Arnold. Norton's cousin, Harvard's president Charles
W. Eliot, appointed him to the faculty in 1873 to teach a course on the His
tory of the Arts of Construction and Design. He began his course with lec
tures on Greek art, including the Parthenon, which he described as a tangi
ble expression of that Athenian simplicity and beauty characteristic of the
Greeks themselves.
Norton taught Loeb that those qualities that recommended their art to
the ages also recommended them as models of right living. Only a people
animated by virtue and a disinterested dedication to the high purposes of
life could create art worthy of centuries-long adoration. "I have it much at
heart to make them [his students] understand that the same principles un
derlie all the forms of human expression," Norton wrote Ruskin, "and that
there can not be good poetry, or good painting or sculpture, or architecture,
unless men have something to express which is the result of long training of
soul and sense in the ways of high living and true thought."12
Like Loeb, Norton saw a connection between virtue and culture. They
both knew that so long as young men chased material dreams, society
would be deprived of beauty. Norton's sympathy with culture mirrored the
definition Matthew Arnold penned in Uterature and Dogma, where he urged
men to acquaint themselves with "the best that has been known and said in
the world."13 The genteel tradition within which these men lived accorded

nLoeb's affection for Norton is clear in the few letters they exchanged. Loeb sent him
news from Europe concerning his collections and the researches he was pursuing. On the
occasion of Norton's eightieth birthday, Loeb commissioned a terra cotta bowl cast from an
original mould from his collection of ancient pottery. "It is an attempt to show the close
relationship of Arrentine potter's art to that of his fellow-craftsmen in the precious metals."
See Loeb to Charles Eliot Norton, November 15, 1907, bMS AM 1088 (4302) Houghton
Library, Harvard University. The recent biography of Norton provides a thorough discus
sion of his place within the intellectual and cultural circles of the late nineteenth century. See
James Turner, The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton (Baltimore, 1999).
12Charles Eliot Norton to John Ruskin, February 10, 1874, Sara Norton and M. A. De
Wolfe Howe, eds., Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, with Biographical Comment vol. 2 (Boston,
1913), 34-35.
13Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma (New York, 1881), xi. James Turner notes a subtle
distinction between Arnold's "timeless" definition of culture and what he sees as Norton's
appreciation of culture's evolution and progress. Still, they would have agreed with Loeb that
the ancients represented exemplary models for contemporaries to heed. See Turner, Liberal
Education of Charles Eliot Norton, 257.

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 Sheets / Antiquity Bound 155

first rank to those enduring productions of the best times and best minds.
Culture contained the promise to transform the individual by inspiring a
synthesis between inner character and outward behavior. In any canon of
genteel culture, the classics of Greece and Rome stood first.
These many influences shaped Loeb's thinking about culture and its pos
sibilities. Along with wealth, he inherited from his family a disposition to
view culture as edifying. Combined with a native sense of duty, he directed
his energies into the sort of cultural philanthropy that led men like him to
endow museums, foundations, and libraries. Loeb's own publishing venture
reflects his faith in the power of the classics to transform an individual. This
same confidence guided popularizers of knowledge throughout the nine
teenth century. Loeb hoped to extend that tradition to his twentieth-century
neighbors. His middlebrow effort to diffuse the classics looked backward
into antiquity, as it looked ahead to a day when modern men and women
would embrace the purer and simpler virtues he believed the ancients em
bodied.

The Library in Cultural Context

As Loeb began thinking about the series, he could have drawn on a long
tradition of popular education efforts. Without regular opportunities for
formal schooling through most of the nineteenth century, individuals
picked up their education where and when they could. Benjamin Franklin's
eighteenth-century Junto provided a model for the nineteenth-century ef
forts of urban young men to engage in what Joseph Kett has described as
the "pursuit of knowledge under difficulties." Literary societies and me
chanics' institutes proliferated in the antebellum period. They satisfied a
desire for individual self-improvement. The lyceum movement, too, dif
fused knowledge to popular audiences. Later in the century, the popularity
of Chautauqua convinced many that an audience existed for programs in
self-culture. The Loeb series, like the efforts of middlebrow culture Joan
Shelley Rubin describes, capitalized on this tradition in innovative ways.14
Chautauqua provides an interesting vehicle for clarifying the cultural pro
ject Loeb undertook. As Andrew Rieser makes clear, Chautauqua's propo
nents emphasized their ties to a broadly defined enlightenment tradition.
While they tapped the expertise of university professors, their interests were
not professional. They saw themselves focused on the "broad humanistic

14Useful works include Kett, Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties, Carl Bode, The American
Lyceum: Town Meeting of the American Mind (Carbondale, 1956) and Donald Scott, "The Popu
lar Lecture and the Creation of a Public in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America," Journal of
American History 66 (1980): 791-809. On Chautauqua see Andrew C. Reiser, The Chautauqua
Moment: Protestants, Progressives, and the Culture of Modern Liberalism (New York, 2003).

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156 Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era / April 2005

culture of the whole man."15 In an age of increasing professionalization,

Chautauqua remained rooted to an ideal of culture that was not anthropo
logical, but Arnoldian.
Loeb's interests coincided with those of Chautauqua's pioneers. He too
used experts in producing the critical editions of his Latin and Greek texts.
Yet, he denigrated the narrow training he feared was being emphasized in
the schools. Instead he prized, like Chautauqua's attendees, a pursuit of
culture unsullied by material goals or practical necessity. Loeb was not a
Dewey progressive. Knowledge was not instrumental; it was ennobling.
It is perhaps not a surprise that both Loeb and Chautauquans looked to
the classics as a legitimate and inspired area of study. The classics had been
prized for centuries. Nineteenth-century colleges required applicants to
know Latin; some required Greek. Yale College in 1828 published a striking
defense of the classical curriculum, an argument that emphasized the an
cient languages' power to discipline the mind. This argument helped to sus
tain Latin in the college course through the nineteenth century. Even when
debate erupted about the utility of the classics, as it did periodically during
the nineteenth century, advocates sang a well-rehearsed chorus praising
their virtues. Latin, they said, disciplined the mind, strengthened a boy's
character, and improved his writing by providing him with examples of
prose style. More to the point, they saw in the classics virtues worth model
ing.16
This may have been what motivated Chautauquans. They drew on classi
cal themes and motifs. An 1890 Chautauquan image Rieser reproduces in
his book affirms their affinity with the ancient world. Lady Liberty raises
her torch above a scene of Greek and Roman figures celebrating the vari
ous arts: painting and sculpture, music, and drama. Chautauquans also
crowded their ceremonies, graduations for example, with the iconography
of antiquity including busts of Greek and Roman poets.17
Loeb's efforts were shaped by this tradition of self-culture tied intimately

15Rieser, The Chautauqua Moment, 103.

16There is a small but growing literature on the classics in American culture. See for ex
ample Caroline Winterer, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellec
tual Life, 1780-1910 (Baltimore, 2002), Barbara F. McManus, Classics and Feminism: Gendering the
Classics (New York, 1997), Meyer Reinhold, Classica Americana: The Greek and Roman Heritage in
the United States (Detroit, 1984), Meyer Reinhold and John William Eadie, Classical Traditions in
Early America: Essays (Ann Arbor, 1976) and Robert Middlekauff, Ancients and Axioms: Secon
dary Education in Eighteenth-Century New England (New Haven, 1963). The International Soci
ety for the Classical Tradition, founded in 1991, publishes The International Journal of the Classi
cal Tradition. My dissertation, "Et Tu, America? The Rise and Fall of Latin in Schools, Soci
ety, and the Culture of the Educated Man" (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 2000), ex
plores the debate over Latin and links its fate to evolving definitions of gentiemanly behav
ior and training.
17Rieser, The Chautauqua Moment, 102,175.

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 Sheets / Antiquity Bound 157

to notions of literature's salutary powers. The classics in particular had gar

nered a reputation that helped to sustain them against repeated critics. The
culture of the classics that Loeb hoped to advance may have seemed quaint
to less sympathetic contemporaries, but Loeb's conviction that the ancients
had something valuable to teach modern men and women spurred his efforts.

Making the Loeb Classical Library

Anchored within this genteel tradition of cultural self-education, Loeb
launched his project. As he conceived it, the Loeb Classical Library would
contain all the extant Latin and Greek works from "the time of Homer to
the fall of Constantinople."18 Each volume reproduced some Latin or
Greek text and paired it with an English translation on facing pages. The
Greek volumes with green covers and the Latin volumes in red were uni
form in shape and size. Individually they were small enough to fit in a
pocket; together they commanded a sizeable bookshelf. The LCL issued its
first fifteen volumes in the fall of 1912, including the works of Cicero,
Terence, St. Augustine, Appian, Euripides, and Sophocles. Only fifteen
years later, there were two hundred titles in print. A reviewer remarked that
the series appealed to all tastes because of the range of the authors and sub
jects included. "Here are the ancient orators, poets, dramatists, biographers,
historians, philosophers. Here are botanists, epigrammatists, geographers,
men of medicine, men of religion." The two hundredth volume was the
"Attic Nights" by Aulus Gellius, described by a reviewer as "a miscellany
like the Congressional Record, but, most unlike that standard sheet, full of cu
rious knowledge and excerpts, not elsewhere preserved, from Greek and
Latin authors."19
The series gathered, in some cases for the first time, material from antiq
uity that had not been available before. Scraps from Menander had been
published, but Loeb assembled the works of this ancient dramatist in one
collection. Similarly, the LCL published more works from Sappho than had
been available before. A reviewer insisted that "no one will really know
Sappho henceforth who does not read the material in this volume."20
Loeb's series provided a comprehensive and accessible collection of famous
and obscure classic texts.
Of course, translation sets had been available before, but what set this

18The quotation comes from the Library's first publisher, the Macmillan Company, in a
printed circular announcing the series. The editors of the Classical Weekly cited it in their
notice of the Library's publication. See "The Loeb Classical Library," The Classical Weekly 5
(February 17, 1912): 126.
19"Two Hundred Nights with 'Loeb'," The Literary Digest 95 (December 17, 1927): 28-29.
20G. M. Whicher, "A Literary Monument," The Outlook 133 (April 11,1923): 668.

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 158 Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era / April 2005

ers. Prior to the Loeb series, the public had the Bohn translations, but these
did not reproduce the original. Moreover, as classicist Paul Shorey noted,
the Bohn translations were "useful but extremely pedestrian...incomplete
and lacking the confrontation of the original text." Because Loeb repro
duced texts in both the original Greek or Latin and in English translations,
the library serviced the scholar and lay reader alike. Loeb's project, said
Shorey, had "never before been so completely, so systematically, so criti
cally done."21
So for the classicist, the library improved upon earlier efforts by provid
ing a comprehensive collection of authoritative texts prepared by experts. It
was important to Loeb that leading classicists from America and Europe
prepare critical editions. He told a friend that the American members of the
series' advisory board had done "yeoman's work" in convincing the best
American classical scholars to contribute. He boasted that the collection
would be "international in the best sense of the word."22
Tapping expert talent was an increasingly common practice in middle
brow projects such as the Loeb series. The Book-of-the-Month Club, for
example, used a panel of experts to vet recent novels for its reading public.
Similarly, the Five-Foot Shelf of Books (1909) relied on the endorsement of
Harvard's president, Charles W. Eliot.23 Loeb's own panel of experts, the
editors he chose to superintend the series, was similarly unimpeachable. To
lead the project he turned to one of England's eminent classicists. T. E.
Page, former headmaster of Charterhouse in England, was, Loeb said, "one
of the gentlest and finest of old men & scholars."24 He earned his reputa
tion as an exacting but beloved sixth-form Latin teacher. Yet his scholar
ship was also much admired. He produced editions of Virgil's writings in
cluding the Aeneid and Horace's Odes and Epodes.25
To assist Page, Loeb hired two other classicists: W. H. D. Rouse, profes
sor of the Perse School in Cambridge, and Edward Capps, professor of
Latin and Greek at Princeton. Rouse wrote a popular translation of the Iliad
as well as books on pedagogy. He affirmed the value of teaching Latin and

21Paul Shorey, "The Loeb Classics," The Harvard Graduates' Magazine 36 (March 1928):
334-35.
22James Loeb to Oswald Garrison Villard, November 20, 1911, bMS. AM 1323 (2309),
Houghton Library, Harvard University [Hereafter, Correspondence].
23Rubin, Making of Middlebrow Culture, 28-29 and 100-03.
^Correspondence, Loeb to Villard, April 23, 1928.
25For Page's career see Niall Rudd, T. E. Page: Schoolmaster Extraordinary (Bristol, 1981), and
these reminiscences: Frank Fletcher, After Many Days: A Schoolmaster's Memories (London,
1937), 244-53; A. L. Irvine, Sixty Years at School (Winchester, 1958), 69-71; Osbert Lancaster,
With an Eye to the Future (London, 1967), 50-51; Ronald Storrs, Orientations (London, 1945),
10-11; and Frank Swinnerton, Swinnerton: An Autobiography (New York, 1936), 247-50.

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Greek by noting their ability to give boys "power."26 Capps, whose schol
arly work was in the Greek classics, was the first American editor of the
Loeb series. He founded and edited Classical Philology', the leading profes
sional journal for classicists. Loeb made use of experts even though he of
ten derided the sort of specialization that made their contributions valuable.
Loeb may have convinced himself that his editors had escaped the parochi
alism of specialists because of their long service to scholarship and to the
public.
As literary men and classicists, Loeb's editors embraced his wishes that
the critical editions produced for him be paired with elegant and artful
translations. These he believed would entice non-classicists. He was not
adverse to borrowing existing translations that were widely recognized as
having special literary merit. In fact, many of the early translations were
themselves classics in English prose. The English translation of St.
Augustine's Confessions, for example, was written in the early seventeenth
century by William Watts. Loeb borrowed William Adlington's 1566 trans
lation of Apuleius' Golden Ass. Others he commissioned. In the months
preceding publication of the first volumes, Loeb said that his editors were
busy "securing scholars to do new translations or to revamp finished Eliza
bethan ones."27 Polished English translations and critical classical editions
could appeal to these two separate audiences, classicists and non-classicists,
each with different needs and interests.

While the collection's scope, critical editions, and literate and literary
translations recommended it to professional and lay audiences, Loeb had in
mind a third audience. These were the growing number of college graduates
who had pursued some Latin and Greek in high school and college but had
dropped the languages after graduation. Interestingly, Loeb failed to note, if
he even perceived, an emerging trend that saw more girls than boys enroll
ing in high school and college Latin courses. By 1910, for example, nearly
60 percent of the students in public high school Latin classes were females.
No doubt his own experiences in all-male classes at Harvard perpetuated
his association of the classics with men.28 In the business world, Loeb knew
many men with a smattering of Latin but whose pressing concerns left no

26Among the many works to his credit is a thin volume entided The Teaching of Latin and
Greek wherein he makes what had become the well-worn argument that the classics trained
the mind while they disciplined the passions. (See page 3). See also his volume Classical Work
and Method in the Twentieth Century (London, 1908). Clearly, as headmaster, he focused his
energies on pedagogical concerns. In this work, he advocated teaching Latin and Greek by
using the Direct Method, the same method used by teachers of modern languages.
21 Correspondence, Loeb to Villard, April 29, 1911.
28Figures on Latin enrollment come from Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year
1909-1910, Vol. 2, Bureau of Education (Washington, DC, 1911), 1174, Table 130.

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 160 Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era / April 2005

^EB^^^^B^^B^^^^^^KBKKumBlr

A page from the 1912 Loeb Classical Library edition of Euripedes's Medea, 2. challenging if
not especially ennobling classical drama. Courtesy of Kevin B. Sheets.

time to practice it. Loeb hoped his library would reacquaint them with their
college authors and even the ancient languages they had studied. While
reading the English translation, these latter-day classicists would skip across
the binding to the original text and by such comparisons renew their ac
quaintance with Latin and Greek. Gilbert Norwood, the classical scholar
and professor of Greek at the University College, Cardiff, praised the series
as a "godsend" for these reasons. "He reads a page of Lucian with fair
comprehension," as Norwood imagined the reader, "turns next to the page
opposite and with many a muttered 'Oh, of course!' realizes a dozen points
which have been only just beyond him at first, which he now takes with
perfect ease, but which he would never have taken at all without such a sys
tem."29
The Nation, in its announcement of the series, also recommended it to this
third audience. These were readers who "take some memory of the classics
with them into the world and still at moments turn to a page of Horace or
Cicero, and who would travel further in those realms of gold but for the

29Gilbert Norwood, "The Loeb Classical Library," Living Age 317 (June 23, 1923): 718.
For a similar argument, see Shorey, "The Loeb Classics," 336.

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 Sheets / Antiquity Bound 161

difficulties of the way." All translations imperfectly convey the original

meaning but the translations provided in the Loeb volumes "will serve
them for dictionary and grammar and tide them over dry and hard
places."30 The series served the professional and the amateur. It was a liter
ary collection as much as it was a resource for the scholar. It was also an aid
for the autodidact.
While the series hoped to inspire a renewed familiarity with the ancient
tongues, some volumes took liberties with the translation of passages that
might offend genteel readers. Not every ancient author, as Loeb well knew,
enriched the soul of readers. Some, in fact, stimulated baser thoughts. The
Epigrams by Martial, the first century A.D. Roman poet, for example, are
replete with passages guaranteed to offend Victorians. Still, Loeb published
this work within the first decade of the series' launch. The translator, Walter
C. A. Ker, who taught at Trinity College, Cambridge, acknowledged Mar
tial's "indescribably foul" passages, but he noted that less than a fourth of
the epigrams were "open to objection." When Ker believed he could trans
late an offensive epigram while still maintaining a level of decorum, he did
so by excising the offending word or words and replacing them with
dashes. The "wholly impossible ones" he rendered in Italian. Martial's
coarse epigram on smells, for example, was translated into English except
for the one offending word:

Os male causidicis et dicis olere poetis

sed fellatori, Zoile, peius olet. (9. 30)

Ker translated the passage as:

Viley smells, you say, the breath of lawyers, and of poets.

But that of a-, Zoilus, smells worse!

In another epigram, also dealing with fellatio, Ker translated Galla's

favors obliquely as her "evil practices."
Loeb's desire for a comprehensive set of ancient authors overrode any

30"The Loeb Classical Library," The Nation 93 (November 9,1911): 438.

31Martial, Epigrams, trans., Walter C. A. Ker, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA, 1920), 260-61 and
72-73. Ker's comments on Martial are found in the introduction to volume 1 of the Epigrams
published in 1919, pages xv-xvi. The more recent Loeb translation of the Epigrams (1993)
displays none of the modesty that restrained Ker. The web site for the Loeb series at Har
vard University Press notes, in a brief history, that translators signed contracts requiring
them to shield readers from offensive passages. See http://www.hup.harvard.edu/
loeb/history.html. According to my email exchange (11-08-04) with Margaretta Fulton, the
current administrative editor of the Loeb series, HUP does not have these early records.

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 162 Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era / April 2005

Victorian disinclination to encounter troubling texts. He published not only

Martial, but also Ovid, whose earthy subjects arched eyebrows. In 1912,
Loeb published Euripides' Medea, a text whose violent themes no doubt
quickened the beat of the Victorian heart. Loeb was not averse to publish
ing these challenging works, but he scrupulously avoided crass language and
vulgarities. If Loeb wanted his audience to enrich themselves on the ancient
bounty, he did not want them distracted by a vocabulary offensive to their
sense of appropriate decorum.

Marketing the Classics

With texts both naughty and nice and audiences as varied as scholars and
students, Loeb began the series with optimism. He told his friend Oswald
Garrison Villard, editor of The Nation, that the times were changing in favor
of the classics. "I believe the pendulum is about to swing back from the
extreme reaction against the Classics," he wrote in 1911, "and while I try
not to be too sanguine, there appears to be a reasonable hope that our Se
ries will be successful & possibly even popular^1 His optimism seems to
have been well-placed. Loeb was pleased by the brisk sales of the Library's
volumes. By 1925 he could report that a quarter of the published volumes
had been reprinted and "some of them have even reached their 5th 6th re
print."33 When Harvard University Press began publishing the series, the
volumes brought in one of every four dollars the press earned. In 1936,
sales of the Loeb volumes in the United States exceeded $27,000. Thirty
years later, sales topped $200,000.34
While Loeb took increased sales as a good sign, he was reluctant in the
early 1920s to push sales in the United States. Writing from Europe, he said
that "every book I sell over there now means a considerable dead loss to
me! This only for your private ear!" Production costs represented one prob
lem but a more irksome obstacle was the "barbarous" Fordney-McCumber
tariff passed in 1922 that imposed a duty on books. The Loeb volumes
were originally printed in London then shipped for sale to the United
States. The Fordney-McCumber tariff was one of the highest tariffs in
American history, and Loeb railed against it because it made his books
harder to sell. "Why, in thunder did not schools, collegiate publishers and,
first & foremost the Nation raise merry hell about the 25% duty in books
printed in English?" he asked Villard in early 1923. By the summer of 1924

^Correspondence, Loeb to Villard, November 20, 1911.

^Correspondence, Loeb to Villard, May 25, 1925.
34Max Hall, Harvard University Press: A History (Cambridge, 1986), 64, 169. When Loeb
died in 1933, he bequeathed the series to Harvard University and established a foundation
(with $300,000) to support classical scholarship. Harvard continues to publish the series.

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 Sheets / Antiquity Bound 163

he was still chafing under the burdens the tariff imposed. Nevertheless, he
hoped Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon would grant him an ex
emption "on our works because of the wholly cultural & non-commercial
nature of the enterprise."35 Despite this setback, the volumes sold enough
to convince Loeb that the effort was worthwhile. Indeed, if the series lost
money it only emphasized the fact that his motive in promoting the series
was cultural more than financial.
Loeb did not engage in a Madison Avenue campaign to sell his books, al
though he took pains to get the series noticed by leading journals of opin
ion in the United States. A primary target was Villard's The Nation. Loeb
showered his friend with letters asking him to promote the series by run
ning reviews of new volumes. He thanked Villard when reviews appeared
but chided him when other volumes went unnoticed. "Won't you stir up
your literary editor & tell him that nary a word had appeared about the
Spring batch of the Loeb Classical Library? There were some very impor
tant & interesting volumes among this lot. Velleius Paterculus & the Res Gestai
divi Augusti which I have just been enjoying hugely."36
The deliberate nature of his promotion of the series may reflect Loeb's
appreciation of literature. The ancients had gravitas. The classic works
calmed and enriched a person. As such, it would have been out of character
to hawk them the way advertisers marketed cigarettes or toothpaste. These
latter commodities appealed to an individual's anxieties about his personal
failures. Whiter teeth, fresher breath, and cleaner bodies became goals in
what Jackson Lears calls the early twentieth-century "perfectionist pro
ject."37 These products appealed to a cult of personality about the self. Us
ing them helped one to fit in to a modern civilization. As Rubin notes in
connection with the Book-of-the-Month Club, advertisers played on middle
class anxieties to induce shame or embarrassment in the individual who had
not read the latest book others were discussing.
Loeb's restrained marketing, by contrast, may reflect a distinction he
maintained between these "therapeutic" appeals common to other middle

^Correspondence, Loeb to Villard, October 1, 1922, January 30, 1923, July 29, 1924 and
November 12, 1924.
^Correspondence, Loeb to Villard, July 29, 1924. Loeb's efforts to encourage reviews in The
Nation are amply documented in the correspondence between him and Villard. That Villard
saw this relationship as reciprocal is evident in his responses where he asks Loeb for adver
tising dollars.
37Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York,
1994), chapter 6, "The Perfectionist Project", 162-95 passim. Warren Sussman stressed the
emergence of "personality" as an important characteristic of modern culture. See his essay,
"vPersonality' and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture," in Culture as History: The Trans
formation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1984), 271-85.
38Rubin, Making of Middlebrow Culture, 98-100.

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 164 Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era / April 2005

brow efforts and his own. The product Loeb offered for sale was not a
book as much as it was a culture and a training that resisted transitory ap
peals. One could not freshen one's breath by reading Antigone, but one
could strengthen one's character. To market his books, he preferred literary
reviews and favorable letters from leading men praising the merits of his
volumes. "I am always glad when a scholar calls the attention of the public
to the merits of the series, which," he told Villard, "I may say without un
due lack of modesty, are really great."39 Their appeal to him, and he hoped
to others, derived from a cult of character nineteenth-century, self-made
men would have understood. Loeb saw himself as a cultural philanthropist.
His books fed the soul.

Culture and Commerce

Loeb's marketing of the classics as a guide to right living connected him
with a group of sympathetic critics who lamented the drift of early twentieth
century culture. Among the faults of the time, critics included its vulgarity,
crassness, and material ambitions. Particular scorn was heaped on popular
or mass entertainment, which critics assumed the working class preferred.
Others regretted what they saw as the crumbling of a cultural hierarchy
Lawrence Levine described in Highbrow I ljowbrow as gaining ground at the
turn of the century. They feared the lowering of standards. Still others per
ceived with great foreboding the implications of Modernism, the intellectual
and aesthetic rejection of Victorian optimism and order. While these criti
cisms came from a variety of sources, they agreed that culture was changing
at the turn of the century, and not everyone embraced the new order.40
Loeb, for example, saw much to criticize in contemporary culture. As
someone who endowed a series popularizing the works of the Greeks and
Romans, Loeb derided what he described as the "so-called literature of the
day." He had in mind those "morbid, pseudo-psychological novels, the pry
ing and indelicate memoirs" that flooded from the presses in ever increas
ing numbers. The "low ebb of our public and business ethics" could be
reversed if men heeded what the ancient dramatists taught. "The applause
bestowed on the decadent drama, the vulgar comedy, the immoral and dirty
play would turn into hisses, were the audience better acquainted with the

^Correspondence, Loeb to Villard, June 11, 1923.

^Paul R. Gorman illuminates the critique intellectuals made of popular culture in Left In
tellectuals and Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century America (Chapel Hill, 1996), esp. ch. 2 and 3.
See also George Cotkin, Reluctant Modernism: American Thought and Culture, 1880-1900 (New
York, 1992), esp. ch. 6. Levine's argument about cultural hierarchy, of course, has its critics.
Joseph Horowitz, for example, notes that culture was less hierarchical and more "confused"
than Levine admits. See his article "Music and the Gilded Age: Social Control and Sacraliza
tion Revisited" in Journalof the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 3 (July 2004): 227-45.

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 Sheets / Antiquity Bound 165

works of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Those old tragedies served a great

moral purpose by focusing motives and lime-lighting consequences."41 No
doubt he read with approval a comment by a reviewer in The Nation. The
classics are to be read because they "rouse us from the baser forms of mate
rialism and teach us, as Marcus Aurelius says, to look on beauty with a
chaste eye."42
That Loeb used adjectives such as morbid, indelicate, immoral and dirty
to describe contemporary literature betrays his sympathy with a Victorian
cultural style that capitalized words like Beauty and Taste. Edith Wharton
could have been thinking of a man such as Loeb when she said of one of
her characters that he found few things "more awful than an offence
against 'Taste,' that far-off divinity of whom 'Form' was the mere visible
representative and vicegerent."43 Loeb seemed to retreat from contempo
rary culture because of its vulgarity. In criticizing it, he imagined an antique
past purer and simpler than his present. His nostalgia for a simpler past put
him in company with Norton and Arnold. Men such as these pined for an
innocent world they thought they remembered from their youth. Loeb's
nostalgia for a classical past which he glimpsed through the literature he
sought to popularize shaped his contrasting opinions on contemporary and
antique culture.44
Others who praised Loeb's project shared his prejudice against the prod
ucts of modern culture. Indeed, Gilbert Norwood celebrated the Loeb
Classical Library for the same reason he castigated modernist painters. Art
had been stolen by "these portentous weeds, futurist painting, cubist sculp
ture, the various Colonial Kiplings. Everyone in his heart knows that these
things are bad, but dares not say so." Critics of modernist painters, he be
lieved, feared looking backward by not embracing the new fad, so they kept
their peace or uttered the same platitudes about "keeping an open mind"
that everyone else voiced. Norwood, like Loeb, spoke for those who be
lieved in the value of standards. Norwood condemned modern artists be

41Loeb's quote comes from his short untitled article published with the proceedings of a
conference on the value of Latin and Greek held in 1906. See, Francis W Kelsey, ed., Latin
and Greek in American Education, with Symposia on the Value of Humanistic Studies (New York,
1911), 215.
42"The Loeb Classical Library," The Nation 93 (November 9, 1911): 438.
43Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence ed. Michael Nowlin (Peterborough, ON, 2002), 67.
^Historians have identified nostalgia as a historical force particularly during the period
following World War I. Though Loeb left the United States in 1905 and never returned, he
took part in this nostalgia for an American world more orderly and innocent than the one
shaping the 1920s. For the use of nostalgia as an interpretive device see Lawrence Levine,
"Progress and Nostalgia: The Self Image of the Nineteen Twenties," in The Unpredictable Past:
Explorations in American Cultural History, ed. Lawrence Levine (New York, 1993): 189-205; and
Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York, 1991), ch. 3.

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 166 Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era / April 2005

cause they forsook standards. "Conventions do not kill art," he said, "on
the contrary they make it possible. And it is just as fatal to keep an open
mind about everything as to keep it about nothing. Get your basis right and
be dogmatic about that."45
While Loeb lamented the attack on standards and the vulgarity of con
temporary culture, he feared the ripple effects on American education. In
particular he opposed the sort of progressive innovations represented by
Charles Eliot's elective system at Harvard and John Dewey's devotion to
experience in the public school curriculum. Eliot's novelty permitted students
to define their own courses of study by selecting which classes they wanted
to take. This was a departure from the traditional arrangement of the cur
riculum into a sequence of required courses that all students followed. Eliot
believed that a student would do better in a course he chose. Dewey's pro
gressive pedagogy was similarly premised on the idea that a child's interest
should direct his studies. Dewey connected the schoolroom with the world
of the child's immediate experiences. The alternative was the traditional
school where content was imposed on the child even if the curriculum
failed to hint at its relevance to his own life.46

While there is no evidence that Loeb read Dewey's works on education, it

is clear that the philosopher's progressive educational ideas would have
troubled Loeb. Modern pedagogy broke with tradition. "The elective sys
tem has overshot its mark," Loeb said. "The constant and growing abuse of
a free choice of subjects," he lamented, "is slowly but surely removing the
props of a solid intellectual achievement." Loeb still believed colleges
should prepare gentlemen. That goal imposed an obligation on the college
to impart knowledge worth knowing. It implied an orderly universe of in
herited wisdom. A liberal education of the sort Loeb esteemed mitigated
the more practical imperative Eliot and Dewey championed. Loeb worried
that the elective system would result in a too early specialization as students
focused too narrowly on only the subjects they liked best. Eliot's plan, he
said, presented an "obstacle" for the student acquiring "that broader and
fairer culture of two or three generations ago." The college students whom
he encountered frequently disappointed him. A college education had been
so degraded that "the graduate of twenty-five years ago reluctantly admits

45Norwood, "The Loeb Classical Library," 722.

46Eliot's ideas concerning the elective system are discussed by Hugh Hawkins, Between
Harvard and America: The Educational Leadership of Charles W. Eliot (New York, 1972), 90, 92
94 and Kim Townsend, Manhood at Harvard: William James <& Others (Cambridge, 1996), 121
25. Two articles which Eliot wrote prior to his inauguration are important statements of his
educational philosophy. See "The New Education: Its Organization," Atlantic Monthly 23
(February 1869): 203-20 and (March 1869): 358-67. For a brief introduction to Dewey's ideas
start with his book Experience & Education (New York, 1938).

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 Sheets / Antiquity Bound 167

the graduate of today into his intellectual companionship."47

Loeb himself had been seduced by the business courses at Harvard. He
later lamented the time he wasted pursuing them. "Thirteen years' experi
ence in very active affairs," he said, "taught me that the time spent at Har
vard studying history of finance, political economy, and international law
might as well have been devoted to the classics for all the practical value I
got out of those worldlier pursuits."48 Nevertheless, many students chased
after these degrees because they seemed more relevant than the cultural
courses in literature and the arts Loeb recommended. But Loeb warned that
what these students received was a deception. Students missed an education
for life when they pursued an education for cash. "Shall we print the dollar
sign on our Bachelor's degrees and flatter their holders into the vain belief
that they are better equipped for money-earning," he asked, "because they
have spent less time in learning lessons that mean vastly more for the inner
Ufe?"49
While Loeb rejected recent pedagogical trends because they encouraged a
utilitarian view of education, he championed the classics because of the les
sons in right living that they could teach. He agreed with what Norton had
taught him at Harvard, that ancient literature and art "invigorates the char
acter while it refines & enlarges the intelligence." Norton told his students
that liberal learning makes man "more clearly conscious of his relation to
men in past time, & in the future. Such a study leads to refinement without
selfishness, to sensitiveness not sensuality, to delicacy but not effeminacy,
to sound & active critical judgement, but not to petulant & feeble fastidi
ousness."50
Loeb and one of his editors, W.H.D. Rouse, also emphasized the appro
priate use of leisure. As they knew, increasing numbers of Americans were
enjoying leisure time in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Indeed, as recent historians have shown, among the middle classes, vaca

47See Loeb's contribution to Kelsey, ed., Latin and Greek in American Education, 214.
4*Ibid.,216.
49Ibid. There is a large literature linking consumerism with modern culture, a link Loeb
perceived and resisted. A brief gloss on these issues is provided by Cotkin, Reluctant Modern
ism, ch. 5, "Consuming Culture," 101-29. Key to this transformation was the increasing so
phistication of the advertising field which promoted the sort of consumerism Loeb la
mented. See Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920
1940 (Berkeley, 1985), Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass
Market (Washington, 1995), and Lears, Fables of Abundance. An enlightening biographical
study of the rise of advertising in the twentieth-century is Larry Tye, The Father of Spin: Ed
ward E Bernays <& the Birth of Public Relations (New York, 1998).
50This discussion of Norton's teaching comes from James Turner's new biography of
him. Turner quotes at length a passage from Norton's lecture notes where he summarized
the advantages of studying the Greeks. Loeb's sympathy for Norton's ideas is clear from his
own writings about the Greeks and Romans. See Turner, The Liberal Education of CharlesEliot Norton, 260-62.

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168 Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era / April 2005

tions became part of their sense of self. Even among the working class,
however, such sites of pleasure and fun as Coney Island drew families with
time to spare.51 Loeb and Rouse asked readers what they would do with
their time. "Lucky is the man," Loeb wrote, "whose early training fits him
for something more than the golf-field, or the tennis-court, and for some
thing better than the gaming-table when his days of business activity are
over." What was left for the man who had amassed his fortune, retired his
business, and whose bones would not sustain the rigors of the fields? "His
Sophocles or his Plato, his Catullus or his Cicero, will make the winter of
life seem like its early spring when the greatest struggle he knew was with
the elusive rules of grammar and syntax."52
In a general introduction to the Library that Rouse wrote, which was re
published in the Classical Weekly, he asked the same question. The modern
machines?"railways, telegraphs, telephones, motors, flying-machines, talk
ing-machines, adding-machines, typewriters"?have saved time, but for
what? "How am I to use the time, space, money, labor which has been
saved? In sloth, eating, drinking, self-indulgence," he asked. "In quarrelling
with my neighbor, and destroying what I cannot understand?" Instead,
Rouse said, the Loeb Library offered "the classical literatures to employ
your leisure. They will not earn you one shilling of money, or build one
electric tram; but they will fill your mind with wisdom and beauty."53 These
are not quantifiable virtues. In fact, Loeb and Rouse seem eager to promote
the ancients precisely because they were not useful in the modern sense. In
contrast to the fleeting virtues prized by modern culture, the lessons from
antiquity were elusive, intangible, but enduring.
Only those already sympathetic to the classics were likely to be moved by
these abstract virtues. Still, to Loeb and others who were so disposed, such
arguments were convincing. In fact, Loeb's defense of the classics drew
upon a well-rehearsed and much-used set of arguments for Latin and
Greek's utility. Proponents had used them to battle Benjamin Rush when
he launched his invective against school and college requirements in the
dead languages. Jeremiah Day famously advocated for Latin and Greek at
Yale in the 1820s because, he believed, they trained the mind and provided
the mental discipline boys needed. Even the Committee of Ten report pub
lished in the 1890s and written principally by Harvard's Eliot emphasized

51The literature on leisure is growing as scholars become interested in vacations. See

Cindy Aron, Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States (New York, 1999). The
two leading works on popular leisure pursuits are John Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney
Island at the Turn of the Century (New York, 1978), and David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and
Fall of Public Amusements (New York, 1993).
52See Loeb's contribution to Kelsey, ed., Latin and Greek in American Education, 217.
53W H. D. Rouse, "Machines or Mind?" Classical Weekly 6 (January 11,1913): 82.

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 Sheets I Antiquity Bound 169

mental discipline in school subjects. This was an argument that helped

strengthen Latin enrollment in schools and colleges at the end of the nine
teenth century. So when Loeb, Rouse, and many others spoke about the
value of Latin and Greek, they did so within a tradition that stretched back
more than a century in America.54
Rouse, for example, believed it was self-evident that professionals bene
fited from Latin and Greek. "How a botanist can do without [them] passes
my comprehension," he said. Rouse encouraged the study of Latin and
Greek because he believed it improved one's writing. He read widely and
perceived contemporary writers as impoverished, as penning congested and
choked sentences. Writing in the sciences, he said, was a "horror." "Dip
into any book in any branch of science and your hair will stand on end, if
you have any feeling for words at all." But even literary works were depress
ing. He quoted an infelicitous passage from a "leading literary journal" and
then concluded: "How unhappy the few English words look in this chaos,
66rati nantes in gurgite vasto" His point was clear: Latin and Greek "help to
cure that slovenliness of thought which is a mark of the modern world."55
Others echoed Rouse's arguments. In a symposium on the value of Latin
and Greek in American education, practitioners in medicine, law, engineer
ing, and theology agreed that the dead languages materially helped them and
would help students in these fields. One engineer echoed Loeb's criticism
of progressive education as misdirected effort. "As a means of inculcating
ideas of exactness the study of Greek and Latin is facile princeps" he said.
"The niceties of translation, the importance of gender, number, and case,
the proper use of the moods and tenses, and the demands of the relative
clause compel the mind toward a certain definiteness which is lacking in
many of the subjects taught in the early stages of education." A lawyer
equated the skills required in puzzling through Tacitus with his efforts to
interpret complex statutes.56 None of these arguments were new or original.
Yet they resonated with a world view these individuals embraced anyway.
And so, Loeb's commercial and literary project emanated out of his sym
pathy with a definition of culture that emphasized moral and intellectual
development. He spurned materialism, though his inherited wealth made
his project possible. He prized culture because it was refined. It elevated as
it instructed. Loeb seems to have assumed, as does Lawrence Levine in his

54See note 16.

55Rouse, "Machines or Mind?", 85-86. The Latin, translated as "a few swimming in the
vast deep," comes from Virgil's Aeneid, book 1, line 118.
56See the contributions of Herbert C. Sadler, "The Place of the Humanities in the Train
ing of Engineers," and Lynden Evans, "The Study of Greek and Latin as a Preparation for
the Study of Law," in Kelsey, ed., Latin and Greek in American Education, 103-04 and 136, re
spectively.

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170 Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era / April 2005

own way, that upper-class purveyors of culture had a lock on its "sacraliza
tion." He certainly invested the classics with a spiritual quality. A person
communed with the arts. They affected one's sensibilities. Loeb believed
that high culture could be, indeed ought to be, communicated to a wide
audience. "My hope has been, and is," he said in 1925, "to make the beauty
and wisdom, the ever-young and immortal charm, of the great writers of
ancient Greece and Rome more accessible to the modern world."57 Like
minded men championed his success. Gilbert Norwood praised Loeb for
launching the classics "into the orbit of normal modern culture." However,
his democratic project to popularize the classics required effort. "That feel
ing for reality, beauty, the sound taste, the relish for what endures, which
the great artist possesses by nature, comes to us ordinary folk by training."58
Giving modern men and women the words of the ancients might help them
save themselves.
Would his contemporaries take up the challenge was another question.
Like other middlebrow projects that promised cultural sufficiency without
much effort, the Loeb Classical Library could become merely another deco
rative piece displayed next to other unread books everyone was talking
about. Critics of middlebrow charged that many purchased the patina of
culture by associating themselves with its products. In 1923, Thomas Mas
son described this phenomenon as "domestic bookaflage," using books as a
decorating element to demonstrate one's cultural sympathy.59
At least one person recognized the danger. The dilettante in Henry
Dwight Sedgwick's magazine dialogue, "The Classics Again: A Dialogue
Concerning the Loeb Classical Library," tells his friends that he recently
subscribed to the Library because "I have an empty shelf at the top of my
bookcase that needs to be filled up. I call it my Via Appia, because I bury
the classics there."60 No doubt many individuals bought books for reasons

57Loeb quoted in "The Making of the Loeb Classical Library," Living Age 325 (April 25,
1925): 215. Loeb no doubt invested the classics with a spiritual dimension to distinguish
them from modern productions he scorned. Historians such as Levine have used similar
sentiments to assume a relationship between the elite and a process of "sacralization" at the
turn of the century. It is important to note, however, that viewing certain cultural artifacts
(the classics, the symphony, the opera, etc.) as sacred crossed class lines. That Loeb often
spoke of these texts as having spiritual qualities does not mean that others, from different
social classes, could not have similarly described them.
58Norwood, "The Loeb Classical Library," 721.
59For Masson's quote see Megan Benton, "Too Many Books: Book Ownership and Cul
tural Identity in the 1920s," American Quarterly 49 (June 1997): 279-84. Incidentally, such use
of books continues. Martha Stewart, for example, purchased a set of Loeb's green Greek
volumes to fill out a shelf in her daughter's East Hampton cottage. A photograph of them
as a display element can be found on page 116 of the May 2002 Martha Stewart Living magazine.
60Henry Dwight Sedgwick, "The Classics Again: A Dialogue Concerning the Loeb Classi
cal Library," The Atlantic Monthly 112 (July 1913): 34.

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 Sheets / Antiquity Bound 171

other than those recommended by their highbrow advocates. Advertisers

cashed in on psychological appeals that generated feelings of insecurity
among consumers who desired above all to fit in. Nevertheless, Loeb in
dulged the idea that readers would take his books seriously. Indeed, as
Sedgwick makes clear, the dilettante who stocked his shelf with Loebs also
read them. In fact, he says that Loeb had challenged educated men and
women to make good on their alleged affinity for literature:

"This is a challenge," affirms the dilettante, "not from a

man of science, but from one of ourselves. I mean from a
man who is interested in literature and professes a belief in
the classics?demanding to know what we honestly, not
professionally, not conventionally, but what, honor-bright,
we think of the classics. The Loeb Classical Library says as
distinctly as a dozen or twenty published volumes, with
ten-score-odd to follow, can say: 'Come, you are no longer
able to take refuge in the inadequacy of your school and
college; you can no longer say that if you had but the nec
essary time to polish up your Greek, to practice your Latin,
you would have Euripides in one pocket and Lucretius in
the other, and in odd moments be gratifying your natural
appetite for the classics. You have no further excuses. Do
you or do you not care a rap about us?'"61

Ultimately, the dilettante was right. The Loeb Library asked educated
men and women the immemorial question about the value of the classics.
Loeb had gathered in a convenient set all the classic works in Greek and
Latin and made them available to a consuming culture. This was not a
monument to himself as much as it was a challenge to others. Resist the
siren cries of Modernity. Steer clear of the scylla of materialism and the
charybdis of corruption. Enter the Elysian fields, with the classics in hand,
and become a better person. Such effort would require the persistence of
Ulysses. While the Loeb volumes could be purchased, culture took time and
discipline, not money. Loeb challenged even those who would use his
books for decoration to take up the classics and indulge in what antebellum
reformers described as self-improvement. As he cast his eyes on the hori
zon, above the stormy sea of modernism, he glimpsed a brighter future il
lumined by the ancient past.

61Ibid., 35.

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