Hector

Jacqueline De Romilly was born in Chartres in 1913, the daughter of Maxime David, a philosophy professor, and Jeanne Malvoisin. She married Michel Worms de Romilly in 1940. She studied in Paris at the Lycée Molière, where she won the general entrance exam in the first year that women were allowed to compete, at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, at the École Normale Supérieure, and finally at the Sorbonne. She held a doctorate in Letters and was an associate professor of Letters. She taught at several lycées, later teaching Greek Language and Literature at the universities of Lille (1949-1957) and the Sorbonne (1957-1973), before being appointed professor at the Collège de France in 1973, the first woman to achieve such a distinction, for the chair "Greece and the Formation of Moral and Political Thought". From the beginning, Romilly dedicated himself to classical Greek literature, teaching and writing, whether about the authors of the classical period (such as Thucydides, on whom he wrote his doctoral thesis, and the tragedians) or about the history of ideas and the progressive analysis of Greek thought (law, democracy, goodness, and even education). Some of his books result from this academic and humanistic background. After being the first woman to teach at the Collège de France, Jacqueline de Romilly was the first woman member of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres (1975), which she presided over in 1987. She was also a corresponding or foreign member of several academies, such as the Danish Academy, the British Academy, the Vienna Academy, the Athens Academy, the Bavarian Academy, the Dutch Academy, the Naples Academy, the Turin Academy, the Genoa Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as several provincial academies, and received honorary doctorates from the universities of Oxford, Athens, Dublin, Heidelberg, Montreal, and Yale. She was distinguished by the Austrian State with the decoration for Science and Arts and received several awards, including the Ambatiélos Prize from the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres (1948), the Croiset Prize from the Institut de France (1969), the Langlois Prize from the Académie française (1974), the Grand Prix of the Academy, awarded by the Académie française (1984), the Onassis Prize (Athens, 1995), among several other Greek awards, most notably the Prize of the Greek Parliament in 2008, a country of which she obtained citizenship in 1995. Jacqueline de Romilly died on December 18, 2010, at the age of 97.