Loeb Classical Library

Aeterna Press · Aristotle · Plato · Boethius · Minucius Felix

Latest release: September 5, 2015

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14

Issues

Loeb Classical Library: Cratylus

Issue #1·Sep 2015

THE Cratylus has always been a source of perplexity to the student of Plato. While in fancy and humour, and perfection of style and metaphysical originality, this dialogue may be ranked with the best of the Platonic writings, there has been an uncertainty about the motive of the piece, which interpreters have hitherto not succeeded in dispelling. We need not suppose that Plato used words in order to conceal his thoughts, or that he would have been unintelligible to an educated contemporary. In the Phaedrus and Euthydemus we also find a difficulty in determining the precise aim of the author. Plato wrote satires in the form of dialogues, and his meaning, like that of other satirical writers, has often slept in the ear of posterity.
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Loeb Classical Library

Issue #2·Sep 2015

HOLDING as we do that, while knowledge of any kind is a thing to be honoured and prized, one kind of it may, either by reason of its greater exactness or of a higher dignity and greater wonderfulness in its objects, be more honourable and precious than another, on both accounts we should naturally be led to place in the front rank the study of the soul.
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Loeb Classical Library

Issue #3·Sep 2015

THIS translation has been made from Bekker’s octavo text, Oxford, 1837. I have also used Aubert and Wimmer’s edition, with German translation and notes, Leipzig, 1860, referred to by me as ‘AW..’ I must confess to finding this work somewhat disappointing; the translation often fails to make the connexion of thought intelligible, and the notes are very scanty and sometimes incorrect. Much greater is my debt to Dr. Ogle’s Aristotle on the Parts of Animals, London, 1882; without this model before me I should never have ventured on so hazardous an enterprise. References to his Introduction are given with his name and the Roman numeral of the page (e.g. ‘see Ogle, p. xxix’), to his notes with the pages and lines of the Berlin edition (e.g. ‘Ogle on 641b 17’).
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Loeb Classical Library

Issue #4·Sep 2015

Meteorology (Greek: ?????????????; Latin: Meteorologica or Meteora) is all the affections we may call common to air and water, and the kinds and parts of the earth and the affections of its parts. These include early accounts of water evaporation, weather phenomena, and earthquakes. An Arabic compendium of the text called Al’thaar Al’ulwiyyah (Arabic: ?????? ????????) made c. 800 CE by the Antiochene scholar Yahya ibn al-Bitriq and widely circulated among Muslim scholars, was translated into Latin by Gerard of Cremona in the 12th century and by this means during the Twelfth-century Renaissance entered the Western European world of medieval scholaticism.
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Loeb Classical Library: The Theological Tractates and the Consolation of Philosophy

Issue #5·Jan 2004

In preparing the text of the Consolatio I have used the apparatus in Peiper’s edition (Teubner, 1871), since his reports, as I know in the case of the Tegernseensis, are generally accurate and complete; I have depended also on my own collations or excerpts from various of the important manuscripts, nearly all of which I have at least examined, and I have also followed, not always but usually, the opinions of Engelbrecht in his admirable article, Die Consolatio Philosophiae des Boethius in the Sitzungsberichte of the Vienna Academy, cxliv. (1902) 1–60.
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Loeb Classical Library: Timaeus

Issue #9·Sep 2015

OF all the writings of Plato the Timaeus is the most obscure and repulsive to the modern reader, and has nevertheless had the greatest influence over the ancient and mediaeval world. The obscurity arises in the infancy of physical science, out of the confusion of theological, mathematical, and physiological notions, out of the desire to conceive the whole of nature without any adequate knowledge of the parts, and from a greater perception of similarities which lie on the surface than of differences which are hidden from view.
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Loeb Classical Library: Theaetetus

Issue #123·Sep 2015

SOME dialogues of Plato are of so various a character that their relation to the other dialogues cannot be determined with any degree of certainty. The Theaetetus, like the Parmenides, has points of similarity both with his earlier and his later writings. The perfection of style, the humour, the dramatic interest, the complexity of structure, the fertility of illustration, the shifting of the points of view, are characteristic of his best period of authorship. The vain search, the negative conclusion, the figure of the midwives, the constant profession of ignorance on the part of Socrates, also bear the stamp of the early dialogues, in which the original Socrates is not yet Platonized. Had we no other indications, we should be disposed to range the Theaetetus with the Apology and the Phaedrus, and perhaps even with the Protagoras and the Laches.
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Loeb Classical Library: Statesman

Issue #164·Sep 2015

IN the Phaedrus, the Republic, the Philebus, the Parmenides, and the Sophist, we may observe the tendency of Plato to combine two or more subjects or different aspects of the same subject in a single dialogue. In the Sophist and Statesman especially we note that the discussion is partly regarded as an illustration of method, and that analogies are brought from afar which throw light on the main subject. And in his later writings generally we further remark a decline of style, and of dramatic power; the characters excite little or no interest, and the digressions are apt to overlay the main thesis; there is not the ‘callida junctura’ of an artistic whole. Both the serious discussions and the jests are sometimes out of place.
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Loeb Classical Library: Laws

Issue #187·Sep 2015

THE genuineness of the Laws is sufficiently proved (1) by more than twenty citations of them in the writings of Aristotle, who was residing at Athens during the last twenty years of the life of Plato, and who, having left it after his death (B. C. 347), returned thither twelve years later (B. C. 335); (2) by the allusion of Isocrates—writing 346 B. C., a year after the death of Plato, and probably not more than three or four years after the composition of the Laws—who speaks of the Laws and Republics written by philosophers (??? ??? ????????); (3) by the reference (Athen. 226 A) of the comic poet Alexis, a younger contemporary of Plato (fl. B. C. 356–306), to the enactment about prices, which occurs in Laws xi. 917 B foll., viz. that the same goods should not be offered at two prices on the same day; (4) by the unanimous voice of later antiquity and the absence of any suspicion among ancient writers worth speaking of to the contrary: for it is not said of Philippus of Opus that he composed any part of the Laws, but only that he copied them out of the waxen tablets, and was thought by some to have written the Epinomis (Diog. Laert. iii. 25).
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Loeb Classical Library: Charmides

Issue #201·Sep 2015

THE subject of the Charmides is Temperance or ?????????, a peculiarly Greek notion, which may also be rendered Moderation, Modesty, Discretion, Wisdom, without completely exhausting by all these terms the various associations of the word. It may be described as ‘mens sana in corpore sano,’ the harmony or due proportion of the higher and lower elements of human nature which ‘makes a man his own master,’ according to the definition of the Republic (iv. 430 E). In the accompanying translation the word has been rendered in different places either Temperance or Wisdom, as the connection seemed to require: for in the philosophy of Plato ????????? still retains an intellectual element (as Socrates is also said to have identified ????????? with ?????: Xen. Mem. iii. 9, 4), and is not yet relegated to the sphere of moral virtue, as in the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle (iii. 10).
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Loeb Classical Library

When I consider and mentally review my remembrance of Octavius, my excellent and most faithful companion, the sweetness and charm of the man so clings to me, that I appear to myself in some sort as if I were returning to past times, and not merely recalling in my recollection things which have long since happened and gone by. Thus, in the degree in which the actual contemplation of him is withdrawn from my eyes, it is bound up in my heart and in my most intimate feelings. And it was not without reason that that remarkable and holy man, when he departed this life, left to me an unbounded regret for him, especially since he himself also glowed with such a love for me at all times, that, whether in matters of amusement or of business, he agreed with me in similarity of will, in either liking or disliking the same things. You would think that one mind had been shared between us two.

Loeb Classical Library: Problems

Issue #316·Sep 2015

The Problems (Greek: ??????????; Latin: Problemata) is an Aristotelian or possibly pseudo-Aristotelian, as its authenticity has been under questioning, collection of problems written in a question and answer format. The collection, gradually assembled by the peripatetic school, reached its final form anywhere between the third century BC to the 6th century AD. The work is divided by topic into 38 sections, and the whole contains almost 900 problems.
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Loeb Classical Library: Parts of Animals

Issue #323·Sep 2015

THIS translation is a revised version of one made by me very many years ago and published in 1882, with introductory essays and very copious annotation. Exigencies of space have necessitated the omission of the former and a very great abridgement of the latter, while the translation itself has been largely altered and corrected. It still, however, remains as before, a very free version; for it is not intended to meet the linguistic requirements of the critical Greek scholar so much as those of the student of biological history, to whom a treatise that is the earliest extant attempt to assign its function to each several organ of the animal body cannot but be of great interest. Such being my main object, I have not hesitated to transfer clauses, or even an entire sentence, when by such transposition the argument can be made less obscure or more consecutive, and have ventured in no few cases to suggest new readings or adopt new readings suggested by others, when such readings are in my judgement called for by the context.
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Loeb Classical Library: Sophistical Refutations

Issue #400·Sep 2015

Sophistical Refutations (Greek: ?????????? ???????; Latin: De Sophisticis Elenchis) is a text in Aristotle’s Organon in which he identified thirteen fallacies.
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