Biography and publications | Jacqueline de Romilly - Greece and the formation of moral and political thought

Biography

Born in Chartres in 1913, Jacqueline de Romilly was the daughter of philosophy teacher Maxime David, killed in the war in 1914, and writer Jeanne Malvoisin. She studied in Paris at the Lycée Molière, Lycée Louis-le-Grand, E.N.S. rue d'Ulm and Sorbonne ; she won the Latin and Greek sections of the Concours Général in 1930, the first year in which girls were allowed to compete, and became agrégée des lettres in 1936 and docteur ès lettres in 1947.

After teaching Greek at a Versailles lycée and then at the Sorbonne, Jacqueline de Romilly was elected to the Collège de France on June 20, 1973, where she held the newly-created chair of Greece and the Formation of Moral and Political Thought until 1984. Jacqueline de Romilly thus became the first woman professor at the Collège de France to be appointed to a state chair. For eleven years, throughout her lectures at the Collège de France, she tackled Thucydides (an author she translated and commented on throughout her career), Homer and Plato, classical Greece always remaining at the heart of her interests.
In 1975, she became the first woman to be elected to the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, and was elected to the Académie française in 1988. In 1995, she became a Greek citizen.

In addition to her fine translation of Thucydides for La Pléiade, her many other works include La Crainte et l'Angoisse dans le théâtre d'Eschyle (1958) ;La Loi dans la pensée grecque : des origines à Aristote (1971) ;La Douceur dans la pensée grecque (1979) ;" Patience mon cœur ! " L'essor de la psychologie dans la littérature grecque classique (1984) ;La Grèce antique à la découverte de la liberté (1989) ;Pourquoi la Grèce ? (1992) ;Problèmes de la démocratie grecque (2006).

Jacqueline de Romilly died onDecember 18 2010.

Learned societies and academies

1961: corresponding member of the Academy of Denmark
1967 : corresponding member of the British Academy
1968 : corresponding member of the Vienna Academy
1975 : corresponding member of the Academy of Athens
1975 : member of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres
1976 : corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy
1977 : corresponding member of the Netherlands Academy
1988 : corresponding member of the Naples Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
1989 : member of the Académie française
1989 : Corresponding member of the Academy of Turin

Awards and distinctions

Honorary doctorate from the Universities of Oxford, Athens, Dublin, Heidelberg, Yale and Montreal
Honorary member of various learned societies in England, Greece, the United States..
Humanism and Medicine " prize awarded by the International College of Vascular Pathology
1981 : Recipient of the Österreichische Ehrenzelchen für Wissenschaft und Kunst (Vienna)
1995 : 1995 Onassis Prize for Culture
March 2000 : Appointed Ambassador of Hellenism, designation made by Athens and subsequently communicated
May 2002 : Elevated to the dignity of Grand Cross of the National Order of Merit
September 2004 : Honorary diploma from the Centre d'études d'Ithaque

Biography

Jacqueline de Romilly, born Jacqueline David, in 1913, became professor at the Collège de France in 1973. She had taught Greek language and literature all her life long, in schools and universities, among which the Sorbonne. At the Collège de France her chair was called "Greece and the formation of moral and political
ideas ". Her interest was centred on Thucydides: she wrote her thesis about the historian(Thucydides and Athenian Imperialism) and produced with Raymond Weil the edition and translation of this author in the Collection of French Universities (Budé) ; but her interest soon widened to the different authors of the fifth century B.C. and she tried to describe the growth and development of all the main ideas which the ancient Greeks introduced and which are still in use to day, for instance the idea of power, or of freedom, or the new teaching and philosophy introduced by the Sophists and so on ; she was also interested in longer developments from Homer to Plutarch, for instance with the idea of kindness and tolerance. She still works along these lines, and her activity in this field has been rewarded by several honorary degrees or elections as corresponding member in several foreign Academies. But, since she retired, she also took an active part in defending the importance of greek and latin studies in french education. She wrote several books about education, founded with some colleagues an Association for preserving literary education (SEL) and gave many articles and even interventions in the press and the medias.