I tried to see if this question had been answered yet or not, so if I am duplicating or reduplicating (hehe), I apologize. What, exactly, is the difference between the orange Cambridge Greek books and the green/yellow ones? My sense has always been that the latter are geared towards beginngers/undergraduate students and the former are for more advanced scholars? I have no actual confirmation of this and have always just been curious. There’s an orange Ajax but not a green/yellow one (I don’t think).
Yes Alex the orange ones, all hardback I think, are in the Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries series, intended “for scholars and advanced students.” (You can look them up.) Roy Gibson on Ovid Ars Amatoria bk.3 is one, and a good one. But you’ll probably want to stick to the yellow/green series for now. Choose one and make you way through it! Ask here if you encounter anything you don’t understand.
I am glad you asked this question because I hadn’t thought about it before.
The Cambridge University Press site describes the orange label as
“This series provides critical editions of Greek and Latin authors for scholars and advanced students. Each volume contains an introduction, a text with apparatus, and a commentary which discusses in detail textual and other problems.”
and the green and yellow as
“This series provides texts and commentaries on works of Greek and Latin literature aimed primarily at undergraduate and graduate students of either language. Almost one hundred volumes have been published to date. The commentaries discuss texts as works of literature while providing all the guidance needed by today’s student.”
So the focus of the orange series is textual (the production of a critical edition) whereas in the green and yellow series it’s a literary commentary and to a certain extent some grammatical help in reading. Some volumes are better at this than others.
A few years ago I made some clearly misplaced remarks about Finglass’s Ajax in the orange series lamenting his lack of interest in literary comment and his “obsession” with textual issues. That seems quite ridiculous now. I think his remarks about the polis in the introduction probably got my back up. Incidentally I have Ajax in paperback but have Hunter’s green and yellow Argonautica Book III in hardback so I don’t think there is a distinction in format between the two series.
As Michael says Green and Yellow are more suited to most readers of this forum. Mastronarde’s Medea is a great introduction to Greek Tragedy.
Somewhat surprisingly, Finglass’ Ajax actually translates every line of the text in the commentary. That would not have been the case in earlier times in a commentary aimed at advanced students.
My copy is in paperback, so they’re not all hardback.
I have Mastronarde’s Medea and Griffith’s Antigone; both are magisterial, if you ask me. I took a Greek tragedy course with Mastronarde about 15 years ago, and we read Hippolytus. He had us buy the OCT and he supplied us with a digital commentary that he had written for the class. It was pretty minimal, and we definitely had to work hard. I think I bought one of those Bryn Mawr texts (the cream colored ones that are pretty cheap) to help me out a little.
The Green/Yellows are better nowadays than, say, fifty years ago when, I hear, students didn’t need as much support. I have the Pindar in Greek/Yellow too, for exampole and that’s also pretty sparse compared to the tragedy ones. Odyssey 6-8 is a decent Green/Yellow as well.
I once took a class on Hellenistic poetry (amazing), and we relied quite a bit on Bulloch’s (perhaps my favorite Greek/classics teacher ever, RIP) commentary of the fifth hymn in the orange series. He had a whole stack of those in his office just sitting there, and I kept trying to drop hints to score a free one, but I don’t think he read my Facebook posts. lol
CGLC and CCTC aren’t such a unified set. The focus of the CCTCs have varied a lot over the years. Cambridge commentators were getting scarce in the 1980s, and the CCTC series started branching out to other institutions around that time.
The CGLC comes more from the Press side. The biggest difference between the two series might be that CGLC target shorter page count, and therefore have to economize on expression. Also, CGLCs get almost all of the female commentators for some reason.
I dont think they do compare because each addressed to different audiences.. Neither of the Cambridge series have a complete English translation, although as Paul mentions the Finglass Ajax translates practically every line in the commentary. Newer Loebs sometimes have an abbreviated textual apparatus but generally don’t, nor do they have any real commentary on the text. The introductions and sparse notes are of varying helpfulness. The coverage of the Loebs is of course much more extensive than the Cambridge series.
Storr says MCMLXII on the title page, but 1912 must be right. Among other things, Storr died in 1919. I don’t have an electronic scan of the 1994 Loeb to hand, but happily have another option to get the page.
And I would be glad to use Antigone for the comparison…but someone will have to ask Finglass to get cracking on the CCTC for it.
Nerd that I am, I have actually been contemplating sending Finglass some fan mail. He says on his page that he’s willing to share his work when possible. Maybe I can tell him we would like one on Antigone.
Notwithstanding my agreement with what has already been said, I feel I must also fly the flag for the epitome of reading commentaries: Richard Claverhouse Jebb’s series of the Greek Tragedies. In addition to his excellent name, these books are a delight to read and an example for economy on the page. Greek is on the left, English on the right (like an oversized Loeb), with limited apparatus and fairly full notes below. The notes advise on grammatical, literary and textual matters. I think the Jebbs are well suited for a modern audience, despite their age, as they are accessible to students who have completed a “Reading Greek” style course, and I certainly still prefer reading Jebbs as a graduate now. It is very nice not to have to flick between pages, and in this sense, the editions feel like a hyperlinked text before the Internet, where you have everything in front of you. But it’s a book and you can let it fall on your lap when you dose.
The month I finished my university Finals I found a full set of Jebbs in an Oxfam going for a very reasonable price, and visited the shop twice before deciding not to purchase them. This will be a regret I tell my grandchildren about to make sure they carpe diem librumque. I have since managed to snaffle an Antigone.
It looks like there is some serious drift in the mission of these series.
I have two volumes of the Finglass Sophocles (Electra and OR) and if these are for graduate students and scholars, one wonders why Finglass gives a line by line translation in his commentary.
I’m reading Philoctetes now with Schein in the Yellow and Green series plus ye olde Jebb, and Schein strikes me as exactly the same level of ambition as Finglass in the Orange series, except that the introductory matter has a little more literary bent, talking about the literary Nachleben of the Philoctetes story, for instance So in a way Schein is more ambitious. Incidentally, Schein offers a lot of translated lines, too, in his commentary.
It’s a long way from the Page, Denniston and Dodd commentaries (Medea, Electra and Bacchae) which now strike one as strangely spotty, not just as a reflection of the immensily deeper knowledge of undergraduates back then, but also of what learned commentaries were supposed to offer.
My feeling is this all changed with Barrett’s exemplary Hippolytos.
So, in conclusion I’d say the Orange series is much better produced as a physical book than the Yellow and Greens. Later reprintings of the latter are virtually unreadable, especially in the skinny Greek fonts. That’s why I try to get the Yellow and Greens in their first edition, for reading comfort.
So, in conclusion I’d say the Orange series is much better produced as a physical book than the Yellow and Greens.
I’m not sure I’d agree with “much better”. I have the paperback edition of Finglass’s Ajax, and the pages are falling out. (I’d agree that that font is good.)
