Une certaine idée de la Grèce: Entretiens

by Jacqueline de Romilly, Alexandre Grandazzi

Au cours de plusieurs entretiens avec un de ses jeunes collègues, Jacqueline de Romilly évoque toutes les étapes de sa découverte du monde grec, à travers les oeuvres qu'elle a étudiées au cours de sa vie. Un parcours où l'on est heureux et fier d'être convié à la suivre, tant son goût de la clarté pédagogique, mais aussi son intelligence et son sens des nuances, son humour parfois, font qu'on a l'impression d'être facilement élevé à la hauteur d'une des plus grandes hellénistes d'aujourd'hui.

Genres: Ancient History

250 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2003

About the author

Jacqueline Worms de Romilly (March 26, 1913-December 18, 2010) was a French philologist, Classical scholar and writer of fiction of Jewish ancestry.

Born in Chartres, Eure-et-Loir, she studied at the lycée Molière, where she was the winner of the Concours général de latin and took the second prize in Greek in 1930. She then prepared for the École Normale Supérieure at the lycée Louis-le-Grand. She entered ENS Ulm in the class of 1933. She then passed the agrégation of Classics in 1936, and became a doctor of letters in 1947.

After having taught for some time in a school, she became a professor first at the University of Lille and subsequently at the Sorbonne (from 1957 to 1973). She was then elevated to the chair of Greek and the development of moral and political thought at the Collège de France — the first woman nominated to this prestigious institution. In 1988, she was the second woman (after Marguerite Yourcenar) to enter the Académie française, being elected to Chair #7, previously occupied by André Roussin. In 1995, she obtained Greek nationality and in 2000 was nominated Ambassador of Hellenism by the Greek government.

She was at one time president of the Association Guillaume Budé, and remains the honorary president of that institution.

Reviews

[Sense of History]

From a specialist in Classical Antiquity, and more specifically ancient Greece, you would expect nothing less than an enthusiastic ode to Greek civilization. And Jacqueline de Romilly certainly lives up to that expectation. In this book, she is extensively interviewed about her more than 60 years of exploration and research, especially of the texts that the ancient Greeks have left us. Because that was indeed her focus: the intellectual history of Antiquity, the evolution of ideas as expressed in texts. Apparently, the historian Thucydides was her main interest, and she discusses that extensively here; but also Homer and the classical tragedians are dissected in detail.

De Romilly gives balanced, empathetic reflections on all of this, in which she is certainly not blind to the shortcomings of the ancient Greeks (their version of democracy, for example), but in which she continually highlights their merits. Her own contribution may be that she pointed out that the Greeks also had a very unique form of humanism, which has been undervalued by modern Western civilization, namely the value of gentleness, the ‘douceur’ that can be found in many texts. I would have liked de Romilly to have made this a little more concrete in this book, but apparently we have to focus on her actual work for that.

Finally, she puts into words something that always strikes me, namely how 'fresh' those old texts are: “In Homer, heroes appear in the splendor of their armor, thrown between life and death, or fighting against the storm or against monsters; they appear simple and brilliant, with their courage, their despair, their tenderness and their desire to distinguish themselves for the common good, they appear in all their grandeur among men, but also with their limitations in the face of the gods; they appear in a world where everything is beautiful and luminous, a world that one touches and hears; from the ardor of the invectives to the dull sound of the body falling to the ground, from the mad temerities, the mad curiosities of the sailors drawn to adventure to the prudence of Ulysses, who has tied himself to the mast to be sure not to give in to the sirens, everything is close, concrete, alive.” "Close-concrete-alive”, indeed, that is perhaps why we will continue to read these texts, and rightly so.

[Marc Lamot · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interview book with Jacqueline de Romilly (1913-2010), a prominent French philologist, specialized in ancient Greek literature, in particular the work of Thucydides and the tragedians. Through her expertise, she is able to shed light on numerous aspects of the classical Greeks, with a focus on intellectual history. Interview books are a risky genre: the answers often remain superficial, and the interviewee is sometimes led too much by the interviewer. This happened to Marguerite Yourcenar in the book interview by Matthieu Galley with her (Les Yeux Ouverts). De Romilly (Yourcenar's successor in the famous Académie Française) knows how to compensate for this by writing a supplement to each chapter in which she deepens or nuances her view on certain aspects. But it remains annoying that the questions of interviewer Alexandre Grandazzi are often longer than her answers. And both at the beginning and the end of this book there are sour belches about the loss of knowledge of the ancients. But all in all this is quite a readable book! More in my History account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show....

[Inés Chamarro · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book of interviews made in 2003 when Jacqueline de Romilly was already blind and retired from any activity other than advocacy in favour of the continuance of Latin and Greek in French schools. The interviews are organized thematically and cover the highlights of her personal life, first, and then and especially the main areas covered by her very long professional life: Tucydides, the Tragics, the Athenian democracy, Homer, her works of fiction and memoir. Her vigour, her voice, her lucidity at ninety years old remain pitch perfect, and the format allows a freedom of expression that would gave been curtailed in a more formal text. A wonderfully enjoyable book. I own several of her more serious works, and when she died in 2010 I felt sorry I had never had the chance to hear her speak personally. I am happy because this book makes me feel now that need has been taken care of and her words have been preserved. Grandazzi, bless him, who is a smart man and clearly prepared himself by reading extensively in advance, asked all the right questions - and got a lot of answers he didn't expect!