French classics scholar Jacqueline de Romilly dies

[December 20, 2010]  PARIS (AP) -- French scholar Jacqueline de Romilly, a specialist on ancient Greece and one of the first women to join the prestigious Academie Francaise, has died. She was 97.

Publisher Bernard de Fallois said Romilly died Saturday at a hospital in the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt.

In 1988, Romilly became the second woman to join the Academie Francaise, the institution that safeguards the French language, after writer Marguerite Yourcenar.

She was known for her books about the authors of ancient Greece and for her defense of the study of the classics. President Nicolas Sarkozy called her "a great humanist whose voice we will miss."

[Associated Press]

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