Still reading, Fulton blushes slightly. Here are the classics uncensored. What s merely awkward for Fulton would have horrified the founders of the Loeb Library which began in 1910 and for generations bowdlerized the ancient Greeks and Romans. But in 1989, Loeb was taken over by Harvard University Press and its once proudly old-fashioned volumes found in classics sections of bookstores, is being updated. Profanity has been restored and the style modernized.
New introductions reflect advances in scholarship.
We knew that some of the texts were badly in need of recision, Fulton said. He s raucous, comic, but he was given a translation that made him sound like he came from the Victorian Age, like Gilbert and Sullivan. It has a certain charm, but its just not Aristophanes. For the past decade, Loeb has been reissuing four books each year. Publications over the next year will include works by Aristophanes, Virgil, Cicero and comedies of the Roman playwright Terence.