The revitalization of the Loeb Classical Library continues apace, at least for some major Greek authors. Alongside Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones’s Sophocles (complete), David Kovacs’s Euripides (three volumes to date), and William H. Race’s Pindar (complete), now arrive the first two volumes of Jeffrey Henderson’s Aristophanes.
It is the general aim of these new Loeb editions to print a sound, up-to-date Greek text (with an abbreviated apparatus criticus) on the verso and a clear, plain, literal English rendition on the recto. There are helpful short introductions to the author as a whole and to the separate works, plus running notes. It may sound unsexy, but the enterprise is, in whole and in part, invaluable. These modestly priced volumes can in fact be recommended even to those who cannot read Greek and want to know what the texts said. The new editions are often replacing editions with less than stellar Greek texts and with English at once sodden with Victorian fustian (“High emprise brooketh no coward wight”) and inaccurate. The joke had it that, in some of the old Loebs, one had to consult the Greek on the left to make sense of the English on the right. Nous avons changé tout cela.
Aristophanes is a special case. The old Loeb Aristophanes, first issued in 1924, was based on the texts and translations of Benjamin Bickley Rogers, an assiduous scholar and a deft comic versifier. (Five of his translations from Aristophanes composed the 1955 Doubleday-Anchor paperback that introduced
