James Loeb (1867-1933), one of the great patrons and philanthropists of his time, left many enduring legacies both to America, where he was born and educated, and to his ancestral Germany, where he spent the second half of his life. Organized in celebration of the sesquicentenary of his birth, the James Loeb Biennial Conferences were convened to commemorate his achievements in four areas: the Loeb Classical Library (2017), collection and connoisseurship (2019), psychology and medicine (2021), and music (2023). The subject of the inaugural conference was the legacy for which Loeb is best known and the only one to which he attached his name-the Loeb Classical Library, and the three series it has inspired: the I Tatti Renaissance Library, the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, and the Murty Classical Library of India. Including discussions by the four General Editors of each Library's unique history, mission, operations, and challenges, the papers collected in The Loeb Classical Library and Its Progeny also take stock of these series in light of more general themes and questions bearing on translations of "classical" texts and their audiences in a variety of societies past, present, and future.

This volume includes Miguel Herrero de Jauregui, "'Trust the God': Tharsein in Ancient Greek Religion"; Jordi Pamias, "Acusilaus of Argos and the Bronze Tablets"; Karen Rosenbecker, "'Just Desserts': Reversals of Fortune, Feces, Flatus, and Food in Aristophanes' Wealth"; Yosef Z. Liebersohn, "Crito's Character in Plato's Crito"; Alexandros Kampakoglou, "Staging the Divine: Epiphany and Apotheosis in Callimachus HE 1121-1124"; Christopher Eckerman, "Muses, Metaphor, and Metapoetics in Catullus 61"; Christopher P. Jones, "The Greek Letters Ascribed to Brutus"; Jefferds Huyck, "Another Sort of Misogyny: Aeneid 9.140-141"; Mark Heerink, "Hylas, Hercules, and Valerius Flaccus' Metamorphosis of the Aeneid"; Lowell Edmunds, "Pliny the Younger on His Verse and Martial's Non-Recognition of Pliny as a Poet"; Eleanor Cowan, "Caesar's One Fatal Wound: Suetonius Divus Iulius 82.3"; Graeme Bourke, "Classical Sophism and Philosophy in Pseudo-Plutarch On the Training of Children"; Jarrett T. Welsh, "Verse Quotations from Festus"; Benjamin Garstad, "Rome in the Alexander Romance"; James N. Adams, "The Latin of the Magerius (Smirat) Mosaic"; Lucia Floridi, "The Construction of a Homoerotic Discourse in the Epigrams of Ausonius"; Massimilliano Vitiello, "Emperor Theodosius' Liberty and the Roman Past"; and Thomas Keeline and Stuart M. McManus, "Benjamin Larnell, the Last Latin Poet at Harvard Indian College."

James Loeb (1867–1933), one of the great patrons and philanthropists of his time, left many enduring legacies both to America, where he was born and educated, and to his ancestral Germany, where he spent the second half of his life. Organized in celebration of the sesquicentenary of his birth, the James Loeb Biennial Conferences were convened to commemorate his achievements in four areas: the Loeb Classical Library (2017), collection and connoisseurship (2019), and after pandemic postponement, psychology and medicine (2023), and music (2025). The subject of the second conference was Loeb’s deep and multifaceted engagement with the material culture of the ancient world as a scholar, connoisseur, collector, and curator. The volume’s contributors range broadly over the manifold connections and contexts, both personal and institutional, of Loeb’s archaeological interests, and consider these in light of the long history of collection and connoisseurship from antiquity to the present. Their essays also reflect on the contemporary significance of Loeb’s work, as the collections he shaped continue to be curated and studied in today’s rapidly evolving environment for the arts.

A GUARDIAN AND INDEPENDENT BEST MUSIC BOOK OF THE YEAR 'At last an expert classicist gets to grips with Bob Dylan' Mary Beard 'Thomas's elegant, charming book offers something for everyone - not just the super-fans' Independent When the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Bob Dylan, the literary world was up in arms. How could the world's most prestigious book prize be awarded to a famously cantankerous singer-songwriter in his Seventies, who wouldn't even deign to make an acceptance speech? In Why Dylan Matters, Harvard Professor Richard F. Thomas answers that question with magisterial erudition. A world expert on Classical poetry, Thomas was initially ridiculed by his colleagues for teaching a course on Bob Dylan alongside his traditional seminars on Homer, Virgil and Ovid. Dylan's Nobel prize win brought him vindication. This witty, personal volume is a distillation of Thomas's famous course, and makes a compelling case for moving Dylan out of the rock n' roll Hall of Fame and into the pantheon of Classical poets. You'll never think about Bob Dylan in the same way again.

This volume represents the most ambitious project of distinguished poet David Ferry's life: a complete translation of Virgil's Aeneid. Ferry has long been known as the foremost contemporary translator of Latin poetry, and his translations of Virgil's Eclogues and Georgics have become standards. He brings to the Aeneid the same genius, rendering Virgil's formal, metrical lines into an English that is familiar, all while surrendering none of the poem's original feel of the ancient world. In Ferry's hands, the Aeneid becomes once more a lively, dramatic poem of daring and adventure, of love and loss, devotion and death. The paperback and e-book editions include a new introduction by Richard F. Thomas, along with a new glossary of names that makes the book even more accessible for students and for general readers coming to the Aeneid for the first time who may need help acclimating to Virgil's world.

The Carmen Saeculare was composed and published in 17 BCE as Horace was returning to the genre of lyric which he had abandoned six years earlier; the fourth book of Odes is in part a response to this poem, the only commissioned poem we know from the period. The hardening of the political situation, with the Republic a thing of the past and the Augustan succession in the air, threw the problematic issue of praise into fresh relief, and at the same time provided an impulse towards the nostalgia represented by the poet's private world. Professor Thomas provides an introduction and commentary (the first full commentary in English since the nineteenth century) to each of the poems, exploring their status as separate lyric artefacts and their place in the larger web of the book. The edition is intended primarily for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students, but is also important for scholars.

The Carmen Saeculare was composed and published in 17 BCE as Horace was returning to the genre of lyric which he had abandoned six years earlier; the fourth book of Odes is in part a response to this poem, the only commissioned poem we know from the period. The hardening of the political situation, with the Republic a thing of the past and the Augustan succession in the air, threw the problematic issue of praise into fresh relief, and at the same time provided an impulse towards the nostalgia represented by the poet's private world. Professor Thomas provides an introduction and commentary (the first full commentary in English since the nineteenth century) to each of the poems, exploring their status as separate lyric artefacts and their place in the larger web of the book. The edition is intended primarily for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students, but is also important for scholars.

This book is an examination of the ideological reception of Virgil at specific moments in the last two millennia. The author focuses on the emperor Augustus in the poetry of Virgil, detects in the poets and grammarians of antiquity alternately a collaborative oppositional reading and an attempt to suppress such reading, studies creative translation (particularly Dryden's), which reasserts the 'Augustan' Virgil, and examines naive translation which can be truer to the spirit of Virgil. Scrutiny of 'textual cleansing', philology's rewriting or excision of troubling readings, leads to readings by both supporters and opponents of fascism and National Socialism to support or subvert the latter-day Augustus. The book ends with a diachronic examination of the ways successive ages have tried to make the Aeneid conform to their upbeat expectations of this poet.

This book examines the ideological reception of Virgil at specific moments in the past two millennia. It focuses on the emperor Augustus in the poetry of Virgil, detects in the poets and grammarians of antiquity pro- and anti-Augustan readings, studies Dryden's 1697 Royalist translation, and also naive American translation. It scrutinizes nineteenth-century philology's rewriting or excision of troubling readings, and covers readings by both supporters and opponents of fascism and National Socialism. Finally it examines how successive ages have made the Aeneid conform to their upbeat expectations of this poet.

These two volumes provide a commentary, with text, on Virgil's Georgics, a poem in four books probably written between 35 and 29 BC. The introduction, in Volume 1, treats the poem's historical background and its relationship to the early years of Augustan Rome, Virgil's use of prior literary material, his stylistic and metrical expertise, and questions of poetic structure. There is also a section interpreting the poem in light of recent scholarship, which seeks to consider the poem as part of the broad unity of Virgil's career, rather than from a narrow didactic approach. A new Latin text of the poem is followed by extensive line-by-line commentary, explaining difficult passages, interpreting poetic intent, and tracing the influence of Virgil's Greek and Roman antecedents. A subject index and indexes of important Greek and Latin words conclude each volume.

This volume and its companion volume devoted to the second half of the poem provide a detailed commentary, with text, on the whole of Virgil's Georgics. Professor Thomas describes this work as 'perhaps the most difficult, certainly the most controversial, poem in Roman literature'. He presents the Georgics as the finished poem of Virgil's mature years, approaching it not merely as a part of the tradition of didactic poetry, but rather as a work which confronts, behind its generic appearance, issues not essentially different from those which inform the Eclogues and Aeneid. His introduction and Commentary argue that Virgil's agricultural world, with its successes, failures and ultimate limitations, represents the arena for man's struggle with the realities of existence. Professor Thomas pays particular attention to Virgil's allusion to and reshaping of prior Greek and Latin poetry. The Introduction also covers stylistic, metrical and structural questions. A subject index and indexes of important Greek and Latin words conclude each volume. This edition is aimed primarily at students at university and in the upper forms of schools, but the range of its scholarship means that it will be valuable to all classical scholars. The Introduction contains material for non-classicists interested in Latin literature.

This volume includes: Daniel Koelligen, " , The Watchdog"; Richard L. Phillips, "Invisibility and Sight in Homer: Some Aspects of A. S. Pease Reconsidered"; Antonio Tibiletti, "Pondering Pindaric Superlatives in Context"; Matthew Hiscock, " : A 'Mot Fort' in the Discourse of Classical Athens"; James T. Clark, "Off-Stage Cries? The Performance of Sophocles' Philoctetes 201-218, Trachiniae 863-870, and Euripides' Electra 747-760"; Giuseppe Pezzini, "Terence and the Speculum Vitae: 'Realism' and (Roman) Comedy"; Neil O'Sullivan, "Quotations from Epicurean Philosophy and Greek Tragedy in Three Letters of Cicero"; Ernesto Paparazzo, "A Study of Varro's Account of Roman Civil Theology in the Antiquitates Rerum Divinarum and Its Reception by Augustine and Modern Readers"; Joseph P. Dexter and Pramit Chaudhuri, "Dardanio Anchisae: Hiatus, Homer, and Intermetricality in the Aeneid"; Michael A. Tueller, "Dido the Author: Epigram and the Aeneid"; Benjamin Victor, Nancy Duval, and Isabelle Chouinard, "Subordinating si and ni in Virgil: Some Characteristic Uses, with Remarks on Aeneid 6.882-883"; Richard Gaskin, "On Being Pessimistic about the End of the Aeneid"; Gregory R. Mellen, "Num Delenda est Karthago? Metrical Wordplay and the Text of Horace Odes 4.8"; Kyle Gervais, "Dominoque legere superstes? Epic and Empire at the End of the Thebaid"; D. Clint Burnett, "Temple Sharing and Throne Sharing: A Reconsideration of and in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods"; Charles H. Cosgrove, "Semi-Lyrical Reading of Greek Poetry in Late Antiquity"; Byron MacDougall, "Better Recognize: Anagnorisis in Gregory of Nazianzus's First Invective against Julian"; Alan Cameron, "Jerome and the Historia Augusta"; Jessica H. Clark, "Adfirmare and Appeals to Authority in Servius Danielis"; and Jarrett T. Welsh, "Nonius Marcellus and the Source Called 'Gloss. i.'"

This volume includes: Jose Marcos Macedo, "Zeus as (Rider of) Thunderbolt"; Nikoloz Shamugia, "Bronze Relief with Caeneus and Centaurs from Olympia"; Hayden Pelliccia, "The Violation of Wackernagel's Law at Pindar Pythian 3.1"; John Heath, "Corinna's 'Old Wives' Tales'"; Maria Pavlou, "Lieux de Memoire in the Plataean Speech (Thuc. 3.53-59)"; Robert Mayhew, "A Note on [Aristotle] Problemata 26.61"; Sam Hitchings, "The Date of [Demosthenes] XVII On the Treaty with Alexander"; John Walsh, "A Note on Diodorus 18.11.1, Arybbas, and the Lamian War"; Loukas Papadimitropoulos, "Charicleia's Identity and the Structure of Heliodorus' Aethiopica"; Ian Goh, "Kun-egonde"; Javier Uria, "Iulius Romanus' Remark on Titinius (123 G.)"; Henry Spelman, "Borrowing Sappho's Napkins"; Fabio Tutrone, "Granting Epicurean Wisdom at Rome"; Boris Kayachev, "He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named"; Florence Klein, "Vergil's 'Posidippeanism'?"; Gianpero Rosati, "Evander's Curse and the 'Long Death' of Mezentius (Verg. Aen. 8.483-488, 10.845-850)"; Fiachra Mac Gorain, "The Poetics of Vision in Virgil's Aeneid"; Ioannis Ziogas, "Singing for Octavia"; Benjamin Victor, "Four Passages in Propertius' Last Book of Elegies"; and David Greenwood, "Julian and Asclepius."

This volume includes: Rachel Zelnick-Abramovitz, "Half Slave, Half Free: Partial Manumission in the Ancient Near East and Beyond"; Chris Eckerman, "I Weave a Variegated Headband: Metaphors for Song and Communication in Pindar's Odes"; Alexander Nikolaev, "Through the Thicket: The Text of Pindar Olympian 6.54 ( ' )"; Tobias Joho, "Alcibiadean Mysteries and Longing for 'Absent' and 'Invisible Things' in Thucydides' Account of the Sicilian Expedition"; Peter Barrios Lech, "Menander and Catullus 8-Revisited: Menander Misoumenos and Catullus Carmen 8"; Katharina Volk, "Varro and the Disorder of Things"; John T. Ramsey, "The Date of the Consular Elections in 63 and the Inception of Catiline's Conspiracy"; Brian D. McPhee, "Erulus and the Moliones: An Iliadic Intertext in Aeneid 8.560-567"; Julia Scarborough, "Eridanus in Elysium: The Underground Poetics of Virgil's Violent River"; Geert Roskam, "Providential Gods and Social Justice: An Ancient Controversy on Theonomous Ethics"; Rafael J. Galle Cejudo, "Progymnasmatic Alteration in the Love Letters of Philostratus"; Moyses Marcos, "Callidior ceteris persecutor: The Emperor Julian and His Place in Christian Historiography"; Valery Berlincourt, "Dea Roma and Mars: Intertext and Structure in Claudian's Panegyric for the Consuls Olybrius and Probinus"; Fabio Stok, "What is the Spangenberg Fragment?"; George M. Hollenback, "Do Not Steal Seed: An Overlooked Double Entendre in Oracula Sibyllina 2.71"; and Paolo Pellegrini, "R. A. B. Mynors and Harvard: An Unpublished Letter to E. K. Rand (10.10.1944)."

Volume 98 of Harvard Studies in Classical Philology offers the following contributions: Miles C. Beckwith, "The 'Hanging of Hera' and the Meaning of "akmon""; Mary Depew, "Delian Hymns and Callimachean Allusion"; Andrew Dyck, "Narrative Obfuscation, Philosophical "Topoi," and Tragic Patterning in Cicero's "Pro Milone";" Joseph Farrell, "Reading and Writing the "Heroides""; Rolando Ferri, "Octavia's Heroines: Tacitus "Annales" 14.63-64 and Praetexta "Octavia""; Aryeh Finkelberg "On the History of the "kosmos""; Joshua T. Katz, ""Testimonia Ritus Italici: " Male Genitalia, Solemn Declarations, and a New Latin Sound Law"; Leonard Muellner, "Glaucus Redivivus"; C. O. Pavese, "The Rhapsodic Epic Poems as Oral and Independent Poems"; Michael C. J. Putnam, "Dido's Murals and Virgilian Ekphrasis"; Ruth Scodel, "The Captive's Dilemma: Sexual Acquiescence in Euripides' "Hecuba" and "Troades""; Michael Weiss, "Erotica: On the Prehistory of Greek Desire"; Jeffrey Wills, "Divided Allusion: Virgil and the "Coma Berenices.""

There has long been vital interest in the ways that texts affect each other--through translation, imitation, parody, and other forms of emulation and subversion. Throughout the last two millennia, the Virgilian text has created its own intertextual heritage, persisting in the works of Eliot, Frost, Lowell, and Heaney. Richard F. Thomas's new volume demonstrates that such control and manipulation of the inherited tradition is to be found with great intensity in the very author who, in turn, created his own complex tradition.
The articles and notes included in this volume have been selected for their diachronic aspect in addition to the synchronic status they had in their original context. Dealing with the intricate ways in which Virgil, and in the introductory chapter his predecessor Catullus, manipulated and appropriated their inherited Greek and Roman literary tradition, this book presents a coherent profile, through these detailed studies, of the mechanics of one of the most dynamic periods in the literary history of any culture.
Richard Thomas--one of the most important voices in Latin literary studies today--shows little anxiety about objections to authorial intentionality. Throughout there is a working assumption that intertextual connections can be established and, further, that functions and purposes, even intended ones, may be inferred from those connections.
This book will be of interest to scholars and students of Greek and Latin literature but will also be of great value to students of medieval, Renaissance, and early modern vernacular literatures, most of whose poets see themselves as closely connected to Virgil.
Richard F. Thomas is Professor of Greek and Latin, Harvard University.