Anne Le Fèvre Dacier, better known during her lifetime as Madame Dacier, was a French scholar, translator, commentator and editor of the classics, including the Iliad and the Odyssey. She sought to champion ancient literature and used her great capabilities in Latin and Greek for this purpose as well as for her own financial support, producing a series of editions and translations from which she earned her living. She was the dedicatee of Gilles Ménage's Historia mulierum philosopharum, whose characterisation of her and of Anna Maria van Schurman was used to provide leading examples in treatises arguing for female education across the following centuries.
Early life and education
The exact date of her birth is not known and sources differ in their opinions: 1647 is proposed by Frade and Wyles and also Conley in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy; the Encyclopædia Britannica suggests 1654; and the Catholic Encyclopedia 1651. The only known portrait of her, dated 1854, has her death at the age of 68, suggesting 1651–52. Eliane Itti argues for 1645, on the basis of the parish register at Is-sur-Tille which would set the date of her baptism to 24 December 1645. Dacier was first raised at Preuilly, in Touraine, where her sister Marguerite was born. She spent the rest of her childhood in Saumur, a town in the Loire region of France, and was taught both Latin and ancient Greek by her father, Tanneguy Le Fèvre. On 29 October 1662, she married Jean Lesnier II. They had a son, Taneguy, born in January 1669, but who died three weeks later. The couple separated around 1670. In 1683 she married one of her father's students, André Dacier.
Classical editions and translations
Her father died in 1672, after which she moved to Paris, carrying with her part of an edition of Callimachus, which she published in 1674. She gained further work through a friend of her father, Pierre-Daniel Huet, then assistant tutor to the Dauphin and responsible for the Ad usum Delphini series of editions. He commissioned her to produce editions of: Publius Annius Florus, Dictys Cretensis, Sextus Aurelius Victor and Eutropius. In 1681 her prose version of Anacreon and Sappho appeared, and in the next few years, she published prose versions of Plautus' Amphitryon, Epidicus and Rudens, Aristophanes' Plutus and Clouds and Terence's six comedies. In 1684 she and her husband retired to Castres, with the object of devoting themselves to theological studies. In 1685 the Daciers were rewarded with a pension by Louis XIV of France for their conversion to Roman Catholicism. Anne and André Dacier collaborated on two translations, Marcus Aurelius' Meditations and Plutarch's first six Parallel Lives. In 1699 her prose translation of the Iliad appeared, which earned her the esteem in which she is held in French literature. It was followed nine years later by a similar translation of the Odyssey, which Alexander Pope found useful. Dacier in turn published in 1724 remarks on Pope's translation of the former, which gained her some fame in England as well.
Controversy
The Iliad, which made Homer known for the first time to many French men of letters gave rise to a famous literary controversy. In 1714, La Motte published a poetical version of the Iliad, abridged and altered to suit his own taste, together with a Discours sur Homère, stating the reasons why Homer failed to satisfy his critical taste. Mme. Dacier replied in the same year in her work, Des causes de la corruption du goût. In defending Homer, Dacier "developed her own philosophical aesthetics. She insists on the centrality of taste as an indicator of the level of civilization, both moral and artistic, within a particular culture." La Motte carried on the discussion with light gaiety and badinage, and had the happiness of seeing his views supported by the abbé Jean Terrasson, who in 1715 produced two volumes entitled Dissertation critique sur L'Iliade, in which he maintained that science and philosophy, and especially the science and philosophy of René Descartes, had so developed the human mind that the poets of the eighteenth century were immeasurably superior to those of ancient Greece. In the same year, Claude Buffier published Homère en arbitrage, in which he concluded that both parties were really agreed on the essential point that Homer was one of the greatest geniuses the world had seen, and that, as a whole, no other poem could be preferred to his; and, soon after in the house of Jean-Baptiste de Valincourt, Mme. Dacier and La Motte met at supper, and drank to the health of Homer.
