Jacqueline de Romilly

Jacqueline David was born in Chartres on 26 March 1913. Her father, Maxime David, a philosophy teacher, was killed in the First World War in 1914. In 1930, the first year girls could compete, she became a prize-winner in the Concours général, the French national competition for secondary-school pupils. She entered the École normale supérieure in Paris in 1933 and passed the agrégation, the demanding national teaching examination, in 1936. In 1940 she married Michel Worms de Romilly, whose name she kept for the rest of her life.

Under the anti-Jewish laws of the Vichy regime in 1941, she and her husband were targeted because of their Jewish family origins. She lost the right to teach and spent part of the war in hiding, moving from place to place. Her thesis on Thucydides was published in 1947. She then taught Greek language and literature at the University of Lille from 1949 to 1957 and at the Sorbonne from 1957 to 1973. In 1973 she was elected to the Collège de France, the first woman professor there, in a new chair on Greece and the formation of moral and political thought, which she held until 1984.

In 1975 she became the first woman member of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres. Elected to the Académie française on 24 November 1988, she was the second woman to join it. Greece granted her citizenship in 1995. She died in Boulogne-Billancourt on 18 December 2010.

Thucydides was the centre of de Romilly’s scholarship. Her thesis, Thucydide et l’impérialisme athénien (Thucydides and Athenian Imperialism, 1947), examined how the historian analysed Athenian power. From 1953 she also edited and translated his History of the Peloponnesian War for the French Budé collection, which prints the Greek text beside a French version. Her later studies followed the historian’s reasoning, the speeches he composed for his characters and the way he drew general lessons from events.

She also wrote widely on tragedy, from La Crainte et l’angoisse dans le théâtre d’Eschyle (Fear and Anguish in the Theatre of Aeschylus, 1958) to La Tragédie grecque (Greek Tragedy, 1970), as well as on Homer, Euripides, the sophists and Greek ideas of law, gentleness and democracy. Books such as Pourquoi la Grèce ? (Why Greece?, 1992) addressed a general audience and asked why fifth-century Athens gave lasting forms to history, tragedy, philosophy and political debate. Her style was clear and written for non-specialists as well as scholars. She also defended the teaching of ancient languages in French schools, in essays such as L’Enseignement en détresse (Teaching in Distress, 1984). Her last book published in her lifetime, La Grandeur de l’homme au siècle de Périclès (Human Greatness in the Age of Pericles), appeared in 2010.

In September 2013 the City of Athens gave her name to the square at Thiseio, near the Pnyx where the Athenian assembly met: πλατεία Ζακλίν ντε Ρομιγί. Some of her books are available in Greek translation, including Το ανθρώπινο μεγαλείο στον αιώνα του Περικλή, and she remains a familiar name to Greek readers of Thucydides and tragedy.

Her books were written in French, so they are not Modern Greek reading practice in themselves. Use the C1 passage on this page instead: find λόγος, διάλογος and δημοκρατία, and note what each word means in context. Then write three sentences of your own, one for each word, about a public debate you have followed. If you visit Thiseio, read the square’s Greek name and describe the place in two Greek sentences.

• Her chair at the Collège de France was called “Greece and the formation of moral and political thought”.
• She received the Onassis Prize in 1995 and a prize of the Hellenic Parliament in 2008.
• The portrait on this page is a press photograph from July 1930, taken after her success in the Concours général.
• Besides scholarship, she published fiction, including the novel Ouverture à cœur (1990).