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. 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.