Armed with volumes of Greek and Latin classics, James Loeb waged a gentleman's war. He took aim at what the modern world prized and with the ammunition of antiquity he sought to defeat it. Specifically, in 1912, he inaugurated the publication of his eponymous classical library of ancient texts and facing-page English translations. The Loeb Classical Library, numbering in the hundreds of volumes, collected into one series all the important works and many obscure texts from antiquity. With the same popularizing instinct that guided other purveyors of middlebrow culture, Loeb aimed to connect a general audience with its classical heritage.² With his set of compact green and red volumes whose publication he funded, Loeb saw himself as a warrior in the centuries-long battle between the ancients and the moderns.

     Loeb's nostalgia for the ancient world shaped his philanthropic project in democratic culture. He romanticized antiquity because he saw among the ancients virtues that the modern world had denigrated. By popularizing the classics, he hoped to counter the drift of modern society, restoring those characteristics nineteenth-century men identified as part of the genteel tradition. Indeed, Loeb was a product of a Victorian sensibility. He thought of literature as ennobling. In this way, his romantic effort to popularize the classics in the twentieth century suggests that the genteel tradition persisted long after historians typically date its end.³ He appealed to an audience of similar souls who embraced the ideal of self-culture. Loeb's volumes attempted to kindle in modern men and women sympathy for the ancient world, a cultural inheritance packaged for retail.