Pierre Lévêque

Pierre Lévêque (; 11 August 1921, in Chambéry – 5 March 2004, in Paris) was a 20th-century French historian of ancient and Hellenistic Greece.

Biography

Training The son of an engineer, he spent his youth in the port of Bordeaux. Reading La Cité grecque by Gustave Glotz, pushed him towards literary studies: he was received in 1940 in the École normale supérieure de la rue d'Ulm then at the agrégation de lettres in 1944. A member of the French School at Athens from 1947 to 1952, he studied in Greece archaic statuary of Delos and excavated the site of Thasos. In 1955, under the direction of André Aymard, he defended his major thesis, dedicated to Pyrrhus of Epirus - the minor one being dedicated to the Athenian poet Agathon, under the direction of .

Works (selection) Detail of Parthenon (1880) by Benoît-Édouard Loviot, featured on the cover of The Birth of Greece. 1961: Nous partons pour... La Grèce 1964: L'aventure grecque 1964: Clisthène l'Athénien, 1964 (with Pierre Vidal-Naquet) [Cleisthenes the Athenian: An Essay on the Representation of Space and of Time in Greek Political Thought from the End of the Sixth Century to the Death of Plato, Humanities Press, 1996] 1966: Nous partons pour... La Sicile, PUF 1966: 1968: Empires et barbaries 1985: Bêtes, dieux et hommes 1985: Le Japon des mythes anciens 1990: La Naissance de la Grèce : Des Rois aux Cités, collection « Découvertes Gallimard » (nº 86), série Histoire. Paris: Gallimard, 176pp., 1994: 1994: 1994: Les Grenouilles dans l'Antiquité 2003: Dans les pas des dieux grecs