Name Anne Dacier | ||
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Similar People Philip III of France, Henry IV of France, Philip VI of France, Charles IV of France, Henry III of France | ||
Anne Le Fèvre Dacier (1654 – Louvre, 17 August 1720), better known during her lifetime as Madame Dacier, was a French scholar and translator of the classics, including the Iliad and the Odyssey.
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Education and editions
Dacier was raised in Saumur, a town in the Loire region of France, and taught both Latin and ancient Greek by her father, Tanneguy Le Fèvre. After he died in 1672, she moved to Paris, carrying with her part of an edition of Callimachus, which she published in 1674. She gained further work through a friend of her father, Pierre-Daniel Huet, who was then assistant tutor to the Dauphin and responsible for the Ad usum Delphini series of editions (commonly known as the Delphin Classics). He commissioned her to produce editions of: Publius Annius Florus (1674), Dictys Cretensis (1680), Sextus Aurelius Victor (1681) and Eutropius (1683).
Translations
In 1681 her prose version of Anacreon and Sappho appeared, and in the next few years, she published prose versions of Terence and some of the plays of Plautus and Aristophanes. In 1684 she and her husband retired to Castres, with the object of devoting themselves to theological studies. In 1685 the Daciers were rewarded with a pension by Louis XIV of France for their conversion to Roman Catholicism.
In 1699 her prose translation of the Iliad appeared, which earned her the esteem in which she is held in French literature. It was followed nine years later by a similar translation of the Odyssey, which Alexander Pope found useful. Dacier in turn published in 1724 remarks on Pope's translation of the former (1715–20), which gained her some fame in England as well.
Controversy
The Iliad, which made Homer known for the first time to many French men of letters (including Antoine Houdar de la Motte) gave rise to a famous literary controversy. In 1714, La Motte published a poetical version of the Iliad, abridged and altered to suit his own taste, together with a Discours sur Homère, stating the reasons why Homer failed to satisfy his critical taste. Mme. Dacier replied in the same year in her work, Des causes de la corruption du goût. In defending Homer, Dacier "developed her own philosophical aesthetics. She insists on the centrality of taste as an indicator of the level of civilization, both moral and artistic, within a particular culture."
La Motte carried on the discussion with light gaiety and badinage, and had the happiness of seeing his views supported by the abbé Jean Terrasson, who in 1715 produced two volumes entitled Dissertation critique sur L'Iliade, in which he maintained that science and philosophy, and especially the science and philosophy of René Descartes, had so developed the human mind that the poets of the eighteenth century were immeasurably superior to those of ancient Greece.
In the same year, Claude Buffier published Homère en arbitrage, in which he concluded that both parties were really agreed on the essential point that Homer was one of the greatest geniuses the world had seen, and that, as a whole, no other poem could be preferred to his; and, soon after (on 5 April 1716) in the house of Jean-Baptiste de Valincourt, Mme. Dacier and La Motte met at supper, and drank to the health of Homer.