HE IS THE IDYLLIC, IMAGINED classical scholar. Head bowed, cloth-bound volume in hand, words from half-forgotten/half-remembered civilisations running across the well thumbed pages.

A breeze lifts his hair, because the classic that he studies fits easily into a jacket pocket so Homer, Virgil and Plato may be enjoyed as they were meant to be, out of doors. The scholar who puts the schole — the leisure — back in to his endeavours.

If only reality were so pleasant. The classicist’s work is typically done in airless metal stacks or in front of photocopied pamphlets and computer screens. But the Loeb Classical Library — founded in 1911 by the dynamic, depressive Harvard graduate and sometime banker James Loeb — perpetuates the pursuit of antique words as an aesthetic and sensuous, as well as an intellectual, exercise. Loeb’s elegant editions are parallel texts, the original Greek or Latin on a facing page with the translation. At a glance the reader can relish not just the author in English but the character of the literary mother-tongue.

“The Loeb”, as it is known in the business, is not best loved by purists — experts who can translate with the speed of Hermes — but is the choice of those whose Attic Greek is a little rusty; or the swath of the British and American populations educated in the 1970s and 1980s when Greek and Latin were pronounced dead on arrival.

Setting out with the immodest ambition of publishing “the entire extant Greek and Latin literature from the time of Homer to the Fall of Constantinople”, the series reproduces bestsellers (Homer’s Iliad, Caesar’s The Gallic War) as well as niche works. Those with a touch of the trainspotter about them will find Frontinus’s Aqueducts of Rome, or Aelian’s On The Characteristics of Animals particularly diverting.

The library has now narrowed its horizons but still commissions new translations. With long-lost ancient works (plays of Sophocles, epic poems, Christian gospels) soon to emerge from Egyptian papyri currently under infra-red examination at Oxford University, the library can look forward to some virgin material.

That is good news for academia. James Loeb endowed a percentage of the library’s profits to the Department of Classics at Harvard and, with 499 volumes in print, it harvests more than $750,000 (£435,000) per annum. In May another moneyspinner will be added: coming in at No 500, Quintilian’s The Lesser Declamations — an experimental law game for the budding attorney of the 2nd century AD.

To celebrate this 500th edition, A Loeb Classical Library Reader has been pulled together.

Here you will find old friends; Odysseus planning to dangle underneath a ram as he escapes the Cyclops or Plato (this translation from 1914) reporting Socrates’ last words in an Athenian jail hours before the “corrupter of the youth” drinks hemlock at the state’s behest: “Socrates sat up on his couch and bent his leg and rubbed it with his hand, and while he was rubbing it, he said, ‘What a strange thing, my friends, that seems to be which men call pleasure! How wonderfully it is related to that which seems to be its opposite, pain, in that they will not both come to a man at the same time, and yet if he pursues the one and captures it, he is generally obliged to take the other also, as if the two were joined together in one head . . . when one of them comes to anyone, the other follows after.

“Just so it seems that in my case, after pain was in my leg on account of the fetter, pleasure appears to have come following after’.”

Although the Reader — like all anthologies (literally a gathering of flowers, but of course only a scoopful of petals) — is frustrating (the excerpts stop just as you are hooked, so we never hear Socrates delivering his mnemonic line “it is time to depart, for me to die, for you to live; which of us takes the better course, god only knows”) it does carry cogent gobbets.

Jilted Medea, about to kill her children, articulates the unbearable perspicacity of the playwright Euripides: “The laughter of one’s enemies is unendurable, my friends.”

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