Jacqueline de Romilly facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Jacqueline de Romilly
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Jacqueline de Romilly
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| Born | 26 March 1913 |
| Died | 18 December 2010 (aged 97) Boulogne-Billancourt, France
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| Nationality | French |
| Education | Lycée Louis-le-Grand |
| Alma mater | École Normale Supérieure University of Paris |
| Occupation | Writer Professor |
| Known for | Member of the Académie française |
Jacqueline Worms de Romilly (born David, 26 March 1913 – 18 December 2010) was a famous French scholar and writer. She studied and wrote a lot about ancient Greece and its language.
Jacqueline de Romilly was the first woman to be chosen for the Collège de France. This is a very important school in France. In 1988, she also became the second woman to join the Académie française. This is a special group that protects the French language. She was best known for her work on Thucydides, an ancient Greek historian.
Her Life Story
Jacqueline de Romilly was born in Chartres, France. She went to school at the Lycée Molière. When she was a schoolgirl, she won a special prize in 1930. She was the first girl to win a prize in the Concours général. She won first place for translating Latin into French. She also won second place for Ancient Greek.
She then studied at the École Normale Supérieure. This is a very famous school for future teachers and researchers. In 1936, she passed a big exam called the agrégation in Classics. This meant she was qualified to teach ancient languages.
However, because she had Jewish family, the government at that time stopped her from teaching. This happened during World War II when Germany occupied France. After the war, she earned her doctorate degree from the University of Paris in 1947. Her main work was about the Athenian Empire and Thucydides. It was published as Thucydide et l'impérialisme athénien.
After teaching at schools, she became a professor at Lille University. Later, she taught at the Sorbonne from 1957 to 1973. She then became a professor at the Collège de France. She taught about the Greek language and how moral and political ideas grew in Greece. She was the first woman ever to get this important job.
In 1988, she joined the Académie française. She was only the second woman to do so, after Marguerite Yourcenar. She wrote many books about Greek ideas, language, and stories. Her biggest interest was always Thucydides, who wrote about the Peloponnesian War.
Outside of her university work, she was known for visiting schools in France. She gave talks about the culture of ancient Greeks. She strongly believed that learning about classic subjects was important. She thought it helped people understand democracy, freedom, and being tolerant. In 1984, she wrote a book called L’Enseignement en détresse. This book was about how school standards were getting worse in France.
She was very upset when people voted to make the French language simpler in schools in 1988. In 1992, she started a group to protect the study of literature.
In 1995, she became a Greek citizen. In 2000, the Greek Government named her an Ambassador of Hellenism. This meant she was a special representative for Greek culture. She passed away in 2010 at the age of 97.
Her Impact
Jacqueline de Romilly's books about the ancient Greek historian Thucydides changed how scholars studied him. Her work helped start a "new era" in understanding Thucydides. Even today, her ideas about how Thucydides viewed empires are still very important.
Her book Histoire et raison chez Thucydide, first published in 1956, is still printed today. It was later translated into English as The Mind of Thucydides. She believed that Thucydides' smart way of thinking had lessons for Europe today.
Jacqueline de Romilly also wrote about other topics besides Greek history. Her book Time in Greek Tragedy is valued by scholars. It helps people understand not only Greek plays but also ideas about time.
In 2016, a book called Women Classical Scholars was published. It included a history of important women scholars, including Jacqueline de Romilly. This book showed how much she contributed to the study of ancient times.
Awards and Honours
Jacqueline de Romilly received many awards for her important work.
- Ambatielos Prize (1948)
- Croiset Prize (1969)
- Langlois Prize (1974)
- First woman member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (1975)
- Elected member of the American Philosophical Society (1978)
- Austrian Decoration for Science and Art (1981)
- Grand Prize of the Académie française (1984)
- President of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres (1987)
- Elected to the Académie française (1988)
- Elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1988)
- Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1988)
- Onassis Prize (Athens, 1995) – for her efforts to keep ancient Greek and Latin teaching alive.
- Appointed by Greece as Ambassador of Hellenism (2000)
- Daudet Prize for defending the French language (2000)
- Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour (2007)
- Prize of the Greek Parliament (2008)
- Grand Cross of the Ordre national du Mérite
- Commander of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques
- Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
- Commander of the Order of the Phoenix (Greece)
- Commander of the Order of Honour (Greece)
- First woman professor at the Collège de France
- She was also a member of many other academies around the world.
- She received special degrees from universities like Oxford, Athens, and Yale University.
Personal Life
Jacqueline de Romilly's father was a philosophy professor. He died in World War I when she was only one year old. Her mother was a novelist who wrote books under the name Jeanne Maxime-David.
In 1940, she married Michel de Romilly. They later divorced in the 1970s.
Books in English
Most of Jacqueline de Romilly's books were written in French. But some of her important works were translated into English:
Books
- Thucydides and Athenian Imperialism, 1963.
- Time in Greek Tragedy, 1968.
- Magic and Rhetoric in Ancient Greece, 1975.
- The Rise and Fall of States According to Greek Authors, 1977.
- A Short History of Greek Literature, 1985.
- The Great Sophists in Periclean Athens, 1991.
- The Mind of Thucydides, 2012.
- The Life of Alcibiades: Dangerous Ambition and the Betrayal of Athens, 2019.
Articles
- "Thucydides and the Cities of the Athenian Empire", 1966.
- "Phoenician Women of Euripides: Topicality in Greek Tragedy", 1967.
- "Fairness and Kindness in Thucydides", 1974.
- "Plato and Conjuring", 1979.
- "Agamemnon in Doubt and Hesitation", 1988.
- "Isocrates and Europe", 1992.
See also
In Spanish: Jacqueline de Romilly para niños
