Born in 1913 in Chartres, Jacqueline de Romilly was the daughter of Maxime David, a philosophy professor who was killed in the war in 1914, and Jeanne Malvoisin, a writer. She attended school in Paris at the Lycée Molière, the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, the École Normale Supérieure on Rue d’Ulm, and the Sorbonne; she won the prize in Latin and Greek at the Concours Général in 1930—the first year girls were allowed to compete—and earned her agrégation in literature in 1936, followed by a doctorate in literature in 1947.
After teaching Greek at a high school in Versailles and then at the Sorbonne, Jacqueline de Romilly was elected to the Collège de France on June 20, 1973, to hold, until 1984, the newly created chair titled “Greece and the Formation of Moral and Political Thought.” Jacqueline de Romilly thus became the first female professor at the Collège de France to be appointed to a state-funded chair. For eleven years, throughout her tenure at the Collège de France, she taught courses on Thucydides (an author she had translated and annotated throughout her career), Homer, and Plato, with Classical Greece remaining at the heart of her interests.
In 1975, she became the first woman elected to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, and she was admitted to the Académie Française in 1988. In 1995, she obtained Greek citizenship.
Among her prolific body of work, in addition to her fine translation of Thucydides for the *La Pléiade* series , notable works include *Fear and Anxiety in the Theater of Aeschylus* (1958); *Law in Greek Thought: From the Origins to Aristotle* (1971); *Gentleness in Greek Thought* (1979); “Patience, My Heart!” The Rise of Psychology in Classical Greek Literature (1984); Ancient Greece’s Discovery of Freedom (1989); Why Greece? (1992); Problems of Greek Democracy (2006).
Jacqueline de Romilly passed away on December 18, 2010.
Scholarly Societies and Academies
- 1961: Corresponding Member of the Danish Academy
- 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 Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres
- 1976: Corresponding Member of the Bavarian Academy
- 1977: Corresponding Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
- 1988: Corresponding Member of the Academy of Naples and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- 1989: Member of the Académie française
- 1989: Corresponding Member of the Academy of Turin
Awards and Honors
- 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, and elsewhere
- “Humanism and Medicine” Award presented by the International College of Vascular Pathology
- 1981: Recipient of the Österreichische Ehrenzelchen für Wissenschaft und Kunst (Vienna)
- 1995: Onassis Prize for Culture
- March 2000: Appointed Ambassador of Hellenism, a title conferred by Athens and announced at a later date
- May 2002: Awarded the Grand Cross of the National Order of Merit
- September 2004: Honorary Diploma from the Ithaca Study Center