Marie-Louis-Antoine-Gaston Boissier (15 August 1823 – 1908), French classical scholar, and secretary of the French Academy

Académie française

L'Académie française , also called the French Academy, is the pre-eminent French learned body on matters pertaining to the French language. The Académie was officially established in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister to King Louis XIII. Suppressed in 1793 during the French Revolution,...

, was born at Nîmes

Nîmes

Nîmes is the capital of the Gard department in the Languedoc-Roussillon region in southern France. Nîmes has a rich history, dating back to the Roman Empire, and is a popular tourist destination.-History:...

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The Roman monuments of his native town very early attracted Gaston Boissier to the study of ancient history

Ancient history

Ancient history is the study of the written past from the beginning of recorded human history to the Early Middle Ages. The span of recorded history is roughly 5,000 years, with Cuneiform script, the oldest discovered form of coherent writing, from the protoliterate period around the 30th century BC...

. He made epigraphy his particular theme, and at the age of twenty-three became a professor of rhetoric

Rhetoric

Rhetoric is the art of discourse, an art that aims to improve the facility of speakers or writers who attempt to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. As a subject of formal study and a productive civic practice, rhetoric has played a central role in the Western...

 at Angoulême, where he lived and worked for ten years without further ambition. A travelling inspector of the university, however, happened to hear him lecture, and Boissier was called to Paris to be professor at the Lycée Charlemagne

Lycée Charlemagne

The Lycée Charlemagne is located in the Marais quarter of the 4th arrondissement of Paris, the capital city of France.Constructed many centuries before it became a lycée, the building originally served as the home of the Order of the Jesuits...

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He began his literary career by a thesis on the poet Attius (1857) and a study on the life and work of Marcus Terentius Varro

Marcus Terentius Varro

Marcus Terentius Varro was an ancient Roman scholar and writer. He is sometimes called Varro Reatinus to distinguish him from his younger contemporary Varro Atacinus.-Biography:...

 (1861). In 1861 he was made professor of Latin oratory 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...

, and he became an active contributor to the Revue des deux mondes. In 1865 he published Cicéron et ses amis (Eng. trans. by AD Jones, 1897), which has enjoyed a success such as rarely falls to the lot of a work of erudition. In studying the manners of ancient Rome

Ancient Rome

Ancient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....

, Boissier had learned to re-create its society and to reproduce its characteristics with exquisite vivacity.

In 1874 he published La Religion romaine d'Auguste aux Antonins (2 vols.), in which he analysed the great religious movement of antiquity that preceded the acceptance of Christianity

Christianity

Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...

. In L'Opposition sous les Césars (1875) he drew a remarkable picture of the political decadence of Rome under the early successors of Augustus. By this time Boissier had drawn to himself the universal respect of scholars and men of letters, and on the death of HJG Patin, the author of Études sur les tragiques grecs, in 1876, he was elected a member of the French Academy, of which he was appointed perpetual secretary in 1895.

His later works include Promenades archéologiques: Rome et Pompei (1880; second series, 1886); L'Afrique romaine, promenades archéologiques (1901); La Fin du paganisme (2 vols, 1891); La Conjuration de Catilina (1905); Tacite (1903, Eng, trans. by WG Hutchison, 1906). He was a representative example of the French talent for lucidity and elegance applied

External links

• Works by Gaston Boissier at the Internet Archive
  Internet Archive
  The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...