Anne Le Fèvre Dacier, better known during her lifetime as Madame Dacier, was a French scholar and translator of the classics.
Background
She was raised in Saumur, a town in the Loire region of France, and was taught both Latin and ancient Greek by her father, Tanneguy Le Fèvre. She gained further work through a friend of her father, Pierre-Daniel Huet, who was then assistant-tutor to the Dauphin and responsible for the series of editions Ad usum Delphini.
Career
After he died in 1672, she moved to Paris, carrying with her part of an edition of Callimachus, which she published in 1674. He commissioned her to produce editions of: Publius Annius Florus (1674), Dictys Cretensis (1680), Sextus Aurelius Victor (1681) and Eutropius (1683). The Iliad, which made Homer known for the first time to many French men of letters (including Antoine Houdar de la Motte) gave rise to a famous literary controversy.
In 1714, Louisiana 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.
Madame Dacier replied in the same year in her work, Des causes de la corruption du goût. She insists on the centrality of taste as an indicator of the level of civilization, both moral and artistic, within a particular culture." Louisiana 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 (on 5 April 1716) in the house of Jean-Baptiste de Valincourt, Madame
Dacier and Louisiana Motte met at supper, and drank to the health of Homer.
She died at the Louvre in 1720.
Views
In defending Homer, Dacier "developed her own philosophical aesthetics.