Jean Capperonnier was a French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 classical scholar.

He succeeded his uncle Claude Capperonnier

Claude Capperonnier

Claude Capperonnier , French classical scholar, the son of a tanner, was born at Montdidier. Though destitute of a learned education, he attained a considerable knowledge of the Latin and Greek, of which last language he became professor at Paris...

, also a distinguished scholar, as the Greek

Greek language

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

 chair at the Collège de France

Collège de France

The Collège de France is a higher education and research establishment located in Paris, France, in the 5th arrondissement, or Latin Quarter, across the street from the historical campus of La Sorbonne at the intersection of Rue Saint-Jacques and Rue des Écoles...

. He published valuable editions of classical authors including Caesar

Julius Caesar

Gaius Julius Caesar was a Roman general and statesman and a distinguished writer of Latin prose. He played a critical role in the gradual transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire....

, Anacreon, Plautus

Plautus

Titus Maccius Plautus , commonly known as "Plautus", was a Roman playwright of the Old Latin period. His comedies are the earliest surviving intact works in Latin literature. He wrote Palliata comoedia, the genre devised by the innovator of Latin literature, Livius Andronicus...

, and Sophocles

Sophocles

Sophocles is one of three ancient Greek tragedians whose plays have survived. His first plays were written later than those of Aeschylus, and earlier than or contemporary with those of Euripides...

. In 1770 he was named to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres

Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres

The Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres is a French learned society devoted to the humanities, founded in February 1663 as one of the five academies of the Institut de France.-History:...

.

He was a close friend of Diderot's, and he is mentioned often in the correspondence between the Abbé Galiani

Ferdinando Galiani

Ferdinando Galiani was an Italian economist, a leading Italian figure of the Enlightenment. Friedrich Nietzsche called him the "most fastidious and refined intelligence" of the 18th century....

 and Mme d'Epinay

Louise d'Epinay

Louise Florence Pétronille Tardieu d'Esclavelles d'Épinay was a French writer, a saloniste and woman of fashion, known on account of her liaisons with Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who gives malicious reports of her in his Confessions...

.