Loeb Classical Library is a project of Harvard University to compile the most extensive consolidated library of ancient works come to be available to us through a myriad of ways, many manuscripts having been bought and sold to private collections, some collected by museums and art galleries, others taken by invading colonizing armies, and the most passed down through the monasteries through the middle ages where the monks spent their entire lives making copies, often adding interpolations that were inconvenient to their Christian beliefs, and probably authoring multiple fraudulent works which the present scholarship takes as legitimate. One the left page of every book is the editorialized original text (a scholar has often taken multiple manuscripts, some with variations, and made editorial decisions how to render the text which may or may not be true to the author’s original) and the right side has usually a very excellent translation into the English, with some conventional deviations.

For example, the Loeb translators make various choices that are, to put it mildly, deceptive and implicate them in lacking academic integrity – the Greek word “Chaldean” – almost always used for the language we today call “Hebrew” – is left alone as Chaldean in the original text, but translated as Hebrew. We find many such examples that make absolute reliance on the translation problematic.

The following volumes have their copyrights expired as Loeb has been publishing since the early 1900’s. You may therefore download them for your use and learning.