Jacqueline de Romilly (1913-2010)

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Jacqueline de Romilly, one of France’s leading scholars of Greek civilization and language and only the second woman to be elected to the Académie Française, died on Saturday in the Paris suburb Boulogne-Billancourt. She was 97. Her death was confirmed by Dr. Philippe Rodet, a friend. Ms. de Romilly, who in 1973 became the first woman named a professor at the Collège de France, embraced the culture of ancient Athens with an almost romantic fervor and spent much of her life championing the humanities, in particular Greek and Latin, whose waning role in the French education system distressed her greatly. Although known as a specialist on the historian Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War, she wrote dozens of books on philosophy and political thought in ancient Greece, on the tragedians Aeschylus and Sophocles, and on Homer.

more from William Grimes at the NYT here.