Nationality French Occupation WriterTeacher | Name Jacqueline Romilly Role Fiction writer | |
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Alma mater Ecole Normale Superieure Known for Member of the Academie francaise Education Ecole Normale Superieure, Lycee Louis-le-Grand Books A short history of Greek lite, The Mind of Thucydides, Magic and rhetoric in ancient G, The Great Sophists in Periclean, Pourquoi la Grèce? Similar People Thucydides, Helene Carrere d'Encausse, Monique Canto‑Sperber, Thomas Arnold | ||
L'actualité des études grecques — Jacqueline de Romilly
Jacqueline de Romilly : Entretien avec Francesca Isidori (France Culture / Affinités électives)
Jacqueline Worms de Romilly ([ʁɔmiji]; née David, 26 March 1913 – 18 December 2010) was a Franco-Greek philologist, classical scholar and fiction writer. She was the first woman nominated to the Collège de France, and in 1988, the second woman to enter the Académie française.
Contents
- Lactualit des tudes grecques Jacqueline de Romilly
- Jacqueline de Romilly Entretien avec Francesca Isidori France Culture Affinits lectives
- Biography
- Influence
- Honours and awards
- Works published in English translation
- References
She is primarily known for her work on the culture and language of ancient Greece, and in particular on Thucydides.
Biography
Born in Chartres, Eure-et-Loir, she studied at the Lycée Molière. As a schoolgirl, she became the first female to qualify for a prize in the Concours général, taking the first prize in Latin to French translation and second prize in Ancient Greek in 1930. She then prepared for the École Normale Supérieure at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. She entered the class of 1933 of the ENS Ulm. She passed the agrégation in Classics in 1936; however, because she was of Jewish ancestry, the Vichy government suspended her from her teaching duties during the Occupation of France. She became a doctor of letters at the University of Paris in 1947. Her doctoral thesis, a "masterful" treatment of Athenian imperialism in Thucydides, was published as Thucydide et l'impérialisme athénien, and subsequently translated into English as Thucydides and Athenian Imperialism.
After being a schoolteacher, she became a professor at Lille University and subsequently at the Sorbonne, between 1957 and 1973. She later was promoted to the chair of Greek and the development of moral and political thought at the Collège de France — the first woman nominated to this prestigious institution. In 1988, she was the second woman (after Marguerite Yourcenar) to enter the Académie française, being elected to Chair #7, which was previously occupied by André Roussin.
In 1995, she obtained Greek nationality and in 2000 was named as an Ambassador of Hellenism by the Greek government. A one-time president of the Association Guillaume Budé, she remained an honorary president until her death at a hospital in Boulogne-Billancourt at the age of 97.
After having only received baptism in 1940, she fully converted to Maronite Catholicism in 2008, aged 95.
Influence
De Romilly's two monographs on the ancient Greek historian Thucydides have been credited with "alter[ing] the landscape of Thucydidean scholarship" and "the beginning of a new era". In 2002, Danish classical scholar Anders Holm Rasmussen described her views on Thucydides' ideology of empire as still "one of the most important viewpoints" with which modern scholars can engage. Published first in 1956, her work Histoire et raison chez Thucydide is still in print in the original French today, and was translated into English as The Mind of Thucydides after her death.
De Romilly also published outside the field of Greek historiography. In recent years, the value of her work Time in Greek Tragedy has been recognized by scholars working not only on Greek drama but also on Aristotle's metaphysics of time.
Honours and awards
Works published in English translation
De Romilly's work was largely published in French, but some of her works were written in or translated into English:
Books
Articles