" This article or section deals with a recently dead person (December 18, 2010) . (...) The text can change frequently, it may be outdated and may fail to decline. "
These phrases appear on the banner warning that opens in its current state, the article "Jacqueline de Romilly" from the French Wikipedia . Precaution is useful in addressing this kind of topic. We are at work or on vacation, or somewhere in between; the event occurs The news spread, it is learned, it is sad, as always disappears when a great scientist or a great researcher who scored your studies, we remember all sorts of things and we hope others, and we feel the need to say a word, without, prima facie, to have anything very new to tell.
And after all, why talk now? Jacqueline de Romilly died: the event was anything but unpredictable, the situation is set to continue, we can take the time to think. Precipitation is a bad counselor, as well when corrected version at the last minute to make it in other contexts more routine.
Moreover, in the universe university, there are ways to hold on to writing for reassurance. They say an old man dies, a library burns, but issued an old man who dies is a library that remains: what a great console himself a little. On hearing the news, I was torn between guilt any khâgneuse not having read enough books of Romilly, of not knowing his work well enough to pretend to talk, comfort and drive the idea of power discover sooner or later (rather sooner than later, the thesis will not be alone) those of his books that I have not read, and reread the ones I had read long ago. It's like those huge editorial projects that one meets in the library when you start to use the money for the scholarly needs of a master's thesis, for example, the third edition of the Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft Pauly, begun by Wissowa in 1890 and completed in 1978 (84 volumes when they tell you to learn German ...): The work is so enormous that it exceeds the length of a human life. Most research projects are not so terrifying, but, in general, there is research that precedes by far the birth of the researcher and will continue long after his death. And after all, we are interested in people born and disappeared there are thousands of years ...
There is something to feel very small, but, in short, content: that people can be born, live and die in a given place at a given time, and that other people Elsewhere, much later, continue to consider them to be interested in this that their efforts were to think the human condition, develop a society, face all the problems that arose and to some extent still exist, and through this process of historians and anthropologists, feed their own thinking, thousands of years in the future. Words of humanities and humanism have been used in many articles published on the occasion of the death (and that's a good thing, because we do not talk enough). In fact, far from reducing the study of Greek antiquity and in general the question (already large) transmission of a language proficiency, think that the approach of humanistic Antique world has the strong sense, as the science they use are the humanities: it's all about the bridge over the centuries and miles, and whereby disparate humans whose lives are at first sight nothing in common, are able to look to each other and recognize themselves as sharing a common condition, observed and constructed all kinds ways depending on the location, times and cultures. Be antiquarian, is like traveling through time and space to meet people who sometimes appear falsely familiar that are quickly radically strange, and yet neither more nor less human, no more or less primitive or civilized than ourselves.
(Photo: A copy of the Realencyclopädie in a library at the University of Göttingen. Source: Wikimedia Commons .)
"For me, I would consider that sufficient 'to these men whose value was translated into action, it also pays homage by acts like the fact that you see today in the official measures taken by them for burial "
(Thucycide, History of the Peloponnesian War , II, 35, Pericles' funeral oration for the dead of the year. Translation: J. Romilly)
Why talk right now, then? First, to give voice and to hear a different perspective than that of the gravediggers, the courtesy not to forget the true beliefs. In 's tribute to the Elysee Jacqueline de Romilly, the Presidency of the Republic, the state institution (which again, fortunately, are in the "long time" beyond the limits particular quinquennium) expressed, as it could only do so in such occasion, and with the dignity appropriate. But it is difficult to recognize in this press voice of the current President, as it is difficult to reconcile this speech with the policy pursued by successive governments.
The opposition between words and deeds is a common method of classical Greek rhetoric: it therefore mobilize our turn, and after this rain-deserved tributes sent to an ardent activist for the protection of literary education, are pushing up 'to obtain satisfaction, asking again and again acts. How much longer will he justify the existence of teaching Latin and Greek from High School? How long will it assert the right of students to study what interests them, and defend that right in front of the pseudo-utilitarianism, which claims to hold the debate by drawing suspicion on the "usefulness" of these materials, better hide the assumptions could not be more objectionable to the "strategy" underlying policy? This policy has beautiful game to budget cuts and closures of positions in the service of an ideology claiming to prepare students for the labor market, but it deprives them of the reality of openness and critical thinking that they are essential to navigate the world as well as "active" than as citizens.
The opposition between words and deeds is a common method of classical Greek rhetoric: it therefore mobilize our turn, and after this rain-deserved tributes sent to an ardent activist for the protection of literary education, are pushing up 'to obtain satisfaction, asking again and again acts. How much longer will he justify the existence of teaching Latin and Greek from High School? How long will it assert the right of students to study what interests them, and defend that right in front of the pseudo-utilitarianism, which claims to hold the debate by drawing suspicion on the "usefulness" of these materials, better hide the assumptions could not be more objectionable to the "strategy" underlying policy? This policy has beautiful game to budget cuts and closures of positions in the service of an ideology claiming to prepare students for the labor market, but it deprives them of the reality of openness and critical thinking that they are essential to navigate the world as well as "active" than as citizens.
remember it again: this is not to affirm the importance of Latin and Greek as a sort of extra something that would act as the cherry (or humanist) on the cake basic teachings of the school, designed as the only really "useful". Restrict the discussion to the question of the usefulness of Latin and Greek returns to guide the eye from the outset against them. Judged by this yardstick, neither history nor French, nor even the math would be more useful (and also we did not hesitate to challenge the teaching of history secondary). It does not fall into the opposite extreme and claim that everyone should learn Latin and Greek. Let's go to Jacqueline de Romilly, precisely in an article published by Liberation in August 2004 "Elitist, no. What I want instead is that all students who wish may study ancient Greek. And not impose it on everyone. "
What matters is not to close its doors to students on the grounds that" it will avail them nothing. " Do not we see the utter contempt that permeates such a conception of teaching? Do we see not that people who despise the Latin and Greek are claiming that this material "privileged" material "elitist" and take this as a pretext to demand the closure of these teachings, these people are precisely those who seek to make these materials of elite materials, and to reserve a privileged few, by ensuring that as many, convinced of their uselessness, is not interested?
(photo: teacher and student with shelf. Cylix of Douris, Berlin, Altes Museum, F 2285.)
(photo: teacher and student with shelf. Cylix of Douris, Berlin, Altes Museum, F 2285.)
On the need to begin learning the ancient languages in high school, I am sure. If it is possible to quickly acquire a strong background in Latin and Greek in the university who discovered, it assumes a more difficult and nothing, in my opinion, can replace the experience that gives the student attendance extended texts of practice permitted by the version and the study of texts in class from the college or high school. It translates famous pieces of ancient literature, and I welcome all kinds of surveys, which provide much more attractive avenues of readings, each of which just be a valuable culture for further studies. I could also remember the immediate concern posed by the mastery of these languages and knowledge of these texts for subjects such as French, history, philosophy (and even if one took the trouble, the mathematics and physics), but I like them too preterition to do so. I end on this subject, noting that it is not because one of the most visible walls of the ancient languages just disappear that these languages have no other defenders of all genders and all ages, including many are very young and, I fear, as vigorous as determined.
"The Permanent Secretary and members of the French Academy are sad to announce the death of their colleague M me Jacqueline de Romilly ..."
( News of 20 December on the website of the French Academy)
Who was Jacqueline de Romilly and what it leaves valuable contribution to Greek studies, the papers speak freely, and his page on the French Academy website may indicate you too. It was First, a brilliant student, whose background is impressive (do not worry: you can excel in this field without first, or first, everywhere) but also reflects changes in national education and cultural institutions: "Life Jacqueline de Romilly (...) is a kind of track record of victories of women in the cultural world of the second half of the twentieth century ", says Jean d'Ormesson today in an article in Le Figaro . To the extent that another section of Figaro awarded him the same day itself, something she would probably not appreciated, a title she has not, the first woman admitted to the competition ENS Ulm, information which, according to my documentation is false, the first admitted to the competition of Ulm who joined the school from 1910 (Jean-Francois Sirinelli (ed.), Ecole Normale Superieure. The book Bicentennial , PUF, 1994, p. 106, note 2), while Jacqueline de Romilly, born three years later, there came in 1933.
A pioneer period anyway, at a time when the SLA was essentially a male world, and long before the merger of the Ecole Normale Superieure de Sevres girls and ENS Ulm in 1985. And a route, incidentally, entirely based the possibilities offered by the National Education College Molière at the College de France and the Academy. Before you sigh at this face of good student so brilliant that it can seem overwhelming, it does not hurt to remember that it is "also" the role of public education that form excellent researchers in all fields.
The route of Jacqueline de Romilly is also representative of that of girls - and women - usually in higher education: after having long been excluded, they will now surpass boys in terms of results, and are majority in the humanities.
is a little surprising to see the French Academy, which offers all sorts of things yet, call Jacqueline de Romilly of "Brother". Even without being a fanatic of the feminization grammar at all costs, like SRS posthumously seems a bit strong. These snakes would they confused with Tiresias? Or have they given up writing "Sister" not knowing how to type an "i" in HTML (& # 339; without the spaces)? If "Sister" would not do them, they lacked the vocabulary or taste for variatio point finding nothing other than "colleague"? I can not bring myself to believe.
Jacqueline de Romilly has mainly worked on classical Greece (that of the fifth and fourth centuries BC) and the literature of that era. She had dedicated her thesis to Thucydides and gave a clear and rigorous translation of his History of the Peloponnesian War to the Collection Universities France (and a single edition in translation, accompanied by a "dictionary Thucydides," in Robert Laffont). For anyone who has ever dealt with Thucydides' version, especially the speeches in Thucydides, whose style is frighteningly twisted is in itself a claim to fame. But outside this ktèma eis aei (this "treasure forever" in the words of Thucydides about his work in I, 22), she has published many books on classical Greece, literary studies and historical, as well as books addressed to a wider audience, where she defends the teaching of letters and ancient languages.
(Photo: Bust of Thucydides, Royal Ontario Museum. Source: Wikimedia Commons .)
While it is customary to ignore the faults of the dead man to raise his eulogy, I will not do here, not least because its merits as easily outweigh the defects in question. If we can blame something on the approach of Jacqueline de Romilly (I say this because I am far from alone) is to have embodied a vision of ancient Greece still strongly influenced by the myth the "Greek miracle", this design reduces Greece Antique democratic Athens of the fifth century, which raises the fully armed like Athena from Zeus's skull in the adorning of all sizes. If that is attractive
this mirage, historians have had it cast off. Greece was far from being reduced to Athens, even if the Athenians would not have seen any objection. Thucydides, for all its rigor, was "not a colleague," as recalled by the historian Nicole Loraux. And Greek civilization as a whole can not be studied independently of the rest of the ancient world, including the ancient Near East. Is that ancient Greece, which history has one of the pillars of what is called a choice of European or Western culture, was terribly Eastern. And today, to speak of Greece, with or without mention of the ancient Near East can no longer be an innocent choice.
It is not, of course, to acknowledge Jacqueline de Romilly of anything: among many other possible reasons, she chose to specialize in the study of some subjects and a discrete period and it is not about questioning the quality of his work (that would be swollen!). There is more excuse for me to take this issue to draw attention to an issue of image and ideas received. Greece does more for the general public, being a sort of miracle marble born in the fifth century BC with the glare of a flash in an empty sky. And if I freely admit I, too, my admiration for this "civilization" (from the dangerous theories of Huntington, it should no longer use that word without quotation marks), I can not agree to read it praised as "very high" without me request "and the other, so they were not so high?" Do
see there is no excess in the cutting of hairs. What is at stake here was already in the nineteenth century, when the study of myths has made in a scientific discipline. As Marcel Detienne explained in Inventing mythology, the first mythologists had so much trouble admitting that the Greeks could believe in fairy tales - myths - as absurd as those which the early anthropologists discovered while around the world among peoples without writing, and even, in the words of Max Müller, "attributed to their gods of things that would thrill the most savage Indians." In a time when the humanities as essential as anthropology and linguistics were still in their infancy, it took much effort before an open mind we do recognize that the Greeks were not superior to "primitive", that primitive were not inferior to others, and besides, Westerners were not particularly savvy with the rest of humans. The same
Marcel Detienne also remember at the beginning of Apollo knife in hand, that this god, which readily depicts all reason and philosophy, which summarizes all the grandeur of antiquity with a capital A, is also the god who presides over the bloody sacrifices, the "butcher boy" who work in kitchens, even the god of violent, criminal rained plague on the Achaeans at the beginning of the Iliad (but I will not be too much on this last point, for fear of reactivating the other false image of the pagan gods, the one we inherited from Christianity and that boils down to enjoy their aspect of "Too Human" for better change tyrants libidinous).
short, we do not remember too how he must be wary of false familiarity of antiquity, whether Greek, Roman or Greco-Roman. It is in this false familiarity breed conventional wisdom. And if Jacqueline de Romilly herself knew what she was doing by confining much of his research at classical Athens, the image that remains of his work and circulating right now to the general public through tributes, articles and reports should not summarize the approach to ancient Greece that the deceased was a Hellenist.
Everything is in the image and the recovery can be made: at a time when researchers, guided by their findings and results of their research, are turning increasingly to the east when they study in Greece, Athens the image of a fiercely independent, on her own, the West can and radically alien to the barbaric boasted to face can become a convenient instrument in the political arena.
After all, being antiquarian today, it also wonder by what miracle the same political discourse can mobilize both the image of Epinal Islamophobic Muslims slaughtering sheep in a parking lot and another image of Epinal Greek philosophers chatting on the steps of immaculate temples, even though we routinely slaughtered sheep in front of these temples and it is hardly more than the creed East of Pythagoras ...
(sacrifice of a young boar. Cylix Attic red-figure painter Epidromos. Source: Wikimedia Commons .) Let us remain vigilant
on the use made of the classical period and the image (largely built by Athenian authors themselves) radiation in Athens, and do not summarize an otherwise ancient Greece broader, extending from the second millennium BC to the sixth or seventh century and includes many other exciting cities and regions that the only Athens, many other genres and art worthy interest that the story thucydidéenne or Greek tragedy. But these nuances and these precautions, it is time to greet her as she deserves the Hellenistic researcher, teacher and activist that was Jacqueline de Romilly, and the extensive work it leaves behind it, and we have not finished reading and rereading.
"... a pulsed light sources of a high civilization - Greek civilization" ( statement from the Elysee tribute to Jacqueline de Romilly)
Jacqueline de Romilly has mainly worked on classical Greece (that of the fifth and fourth centuries BC) and the literature of that era. She had dedicated her thesis to Thucydides and gave a clear and rigorous translation of his History of the Peloponnesian War to the Collection Universities France (and a single edition in translation, accompanied by a "dictionary Thucydides," in Robert Laffont). For anyone who has ever dealt with Thucydides' version, especially the speeches in Thucydides, whose style is frighteningly twisted is in itself a claim to fame. But outside this ktèma eis aei (this "treasure forever" in the words of Thucydides about his work in I, 22), she has published many books on classical Greece, literary studies and historical, as well as books addressed to a wider audience, where she defends the teaching of letters and ancient languages.
(Photo: Bust of Thucydides, Royal Ontario Museum. Source: Wikimedia Commons .)
While it is customary to ignore the faults of the dead man to raise his eulogy, I will not do here, not least because its merits as easily outweigh the defects in question. If we can blame something on the approach of Jacqueline de Romilly (I say this because I am far from alone) is to have embodied a vision of ancient Greece still strongly influenced by the myth the "Greek miracle", this design reduces Greece Antique democratic Athens of the fifth century, which raises the fully armed like Athena from Zeus's skull in the adorning of all sizes. If that is attractive this mirage, historians have had it cast off. Greece was far from being reduced to Athens, even if the Athenians would not have seen any objection. Thucydides, for all its rigor, was "not a colleague," as recalled by the historian Nicole Loraux. And Greek civilization as a whole can not be studied independently of the rest of the ancient world, including the ancient Near East. Is that ancient Greece, which history has one of the pillars of what is called a choice of European or Western culture, was terribly Eastern. And today, to speak of Greece, with or without mention of the ancient Near East can no longer be an innocent choice.
It is not, of course, to acknowledge Jacqueline de Romilly of anything: among many other possible reasons, she chose to specialize in the study of some subjects and a discrete period and it is not about questioning the quality of his work (that would be swollen!). There is more excuse for me to take this issue to draw attention to an issue of image and ideas received. Greece does more for the general public, being a sort of miracle marble born in the fifth century BC with the glare of a flash in an empty sky. And if I freely admit I, too, my admiration for this "civilization" (from the dangerous theories of Huntington, it should no longer use that word without quotation marks), I can not agree to read it praised as "very high" without me request "and the other, so they were not so high?" Do
see there is no excess in the cutting of hairs. What is at stake here was already in the nineteenth century, when the study of myths has made in a scientific discipline. As Marcel Detienne explained in Inventing mythology, the first mythologists had so much trouble admitting that the Greeks could believe in fairy tales - myths - as absurd as those which the early anthropologists discovered while around the world among peoples without writing, and even, in the words of Max Müller, "attributed to their gods of things that would thrill the most savage Indians." In a time when the humanities as essential as anthropology and linguistics were still in their infancy, it took much effort before an open mind we do recognize that the Greeks were not superior to "primitive", that primitive were not inferior to others, and besides, Westerners were not particularly savvy with the rest of humans. The same
Marcel Detienne also remember at the beginning of Apollo knife in hand, that this god, which readily depicts all reason and philosophy, which summarizes all the grandeur of antiquity with a capital A, is also the god who presides over the bloody sacrifices, the "butcher boy" who work in kitchens, even the god of violent, criminal rained plague on the Achaeans at the beginning of the Iliad (but I will not be too much on this last point, for fear of reactivating the other false image of the pagan gods, the one we inherited from Christianity and that boils down to enjoy their aspect of "Too Human" for better change tyrants libidinous).
short, we do not remember too how he must be wary of false familiarity of antiquity, whether Greek, Roman or Greco-Roman. It is in this false familiarity breed conventional wisdom. And if Jacqueline de Romilly herself knew what she was doing by confining much of his research at classical Athens, the image that remains of his work and circulating right now to the general public through tributes, articles and reports should not summarize the approach to ancient Greece that the deceased was a Hellenist.
Everything is in the image and the recovery can be made: at a time when researchers, guided by their findings and results of their research, are turning increasingly to the east when they study in Greece, Athens the image of a fiercely independent, on her own, the West can and radically alien to the barbaric boasted to face can become a convenient instrument in the political arena.
After all, being antiquarian today, it also wonder by what miracle the same political discourse can mobilize both the image of Epinal Islamophobic Muslims slaughtering sheep in a parking lot and another image of Epinal Greek philosophers chatting on the steps of immaculate temples, even though we routinely slaughtered sheep in front of these temples and it is hardly more than the creed East of Pythagoras ...
(sacrifice of a young boar. Cylix Attic red-figure painter Epidromos. Source: Wikimedia Commons .) Let us remain vigilant
on the use made of the classical period and the image (largely built by Athenian authors themselves) radiation in Athens, and do not summarize an otherwise ancient Greece broader, extending from the second millennium BC to the sixth or seventh century and includes many other exciting cities and regions that the only Athens, many other genres and art worthy interest that the story thucydidéenne or Greek tragedy. But these nuances and these precautions, it is time to greet her as she deserves the Hellenistic researcher, teacher and activist that was Jacqueline de Romilly, and the extensive work it leaves behind it, and we have not finished reading and rereading.
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