The Red and the Green: James Loeb and His Classical Library

There they sit on bookshelves throughout the English-speaking world, the elegant little volumes of the Loeb Classical Library—now just over a hundred years old—a tidy compilation of nearly the entire Greco-Roman literary tradition. The strictures of cataloguing systems often scatter the Loebs throughout a library's collection, yet the connoisseur knows to keep the books neatly grouped together, the Greek volumes first, followed by the Latin ones. At a moment's notice the required classical text with its facing-page translation can be pulled down for consultation, but even more pleasing than this readiness of reference is the idea of the collection itself. Greece and Rome at one's fingertips! There is, despite its American origin, an Edwardian air about the series, an imperial confidence coupled with a fusty antiquarianism. The old-fashioned sound of the translations is naturally a large part of it. Beyond that, however, simply in looking upon this canon bound in red and green, you almost feel yourself seated in a leather chair, the postprandial snifter of brandy in one hand, a cigar in the other. Still the anxieties of the age from which they come, the sense of decline and of lost authority, are palpable as well. What we find, in both the collection and in its founder, is a portrait of the culture that endured the Great War after its birth in the Gilded Age.

James Loeb was the scion of the tight-knit clique of wealthy German-Jews living in nineteenth-century New York that called itself "our crowd" (the title, in fact, of Stephen Birmingham's 1967 book on this group). Some of the names that would become most prominent in the world of finance were to be found among these families, including the Guggenheims, Goldmans, and Rothschilds. Growing up amidst fabulous wealth, Loeb made much of his privilege despite having a sensitive nature. He became both an accomplished cellist and a brilliant student of the classics during his years at Harvard. Upon his graduation in 1888, Loeb was offered a fellowship that included, as he noted later, "a number of years of study in Egyptology in Paris and London, opportunity to excavate in Egypt itself, with a fair assurance of a curatorship at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and a teacher's post at Harvard." Enormous familial pressure was brought to bear against this, however; and, much against his will, he joined the family firm of Kuhn, Loeb and Co., one of the powerhouse investment banks of the day. Loeb's desire about this same time to marry a Gentile woman was also blocked by the redoubtable clan. Discussing these disappointments of Loeb, Stephen Birmingham succinctly puts it, "A child in a gilded ghetto was not supposed to have a life of his own."

As a man of superior intelligence, Loeb did well in finance, though his nerves were ultimately unequal to the rough-and-tumble atmosphere of the robber-baron era. Kuhn, Loeb was heavily involved in Wall Street intrigues of the period and, as the new century dawned, almost caused the market to crash during its extended battle with J. P. Morgan over control of the Union Pacific railroad. The firm ultimately prospered, but the toll was too heavy for Loeb. "Overwork in the banking business," he wrote in a Harvard class bulletin, "resulted in completely breaking up my health, so that after a protracted absence from business I decided on January 1, 1902, to retire from all active participation in affairs." Shortly thereafter Loeb withdrew to Europe, where he was treated by Sigmund Freud. He later settled in a country estate outside Munich, never to return to the U.S., and dedicated himself until his death in 1933 to strictly philanthropic enterprises. Among these can be counted his generous support of the American School at Athens, his patronage of the Max Planck Institute für Psychiatrie in Munich, his founding of the Institute of Musical Art in New York City (later to become Juilliard), and of course, his creation of the Loeb Classical Library.

The...