The Career Classicist

Abstract

Abstract Anne Dacier (1647–1720)—as a lauded ‘savante’, as an Ancient in the Homer Quarrel, and as an accepted and prominent participant in that quarrel—cuts an exceptional figure. This chapter, focusing on her translations from 1681 to 1688 and her interventions in the Homer Quarrel (1711–16), explores the strategies Dacier deployed to make her career as a Classicist, examining how she negotiated the usually irreconcilable identities of scholar, woman, and quarreller. For all the respect she commanded, Dacier also had to navigate expectations of her gender, making an apparently successful distinction between social and authorial identities. The chapter then examines her reception to trouble the assumptions behind the categories of ‘woman writer’ and ‘Classicist’. Her professional endeavours made their mark as she advocated ancient Greek and Roman literary heritage, but, as is shown, she also freed translations aimed at ‘women readers’ from the territory of the Moderns.