Pierre Lévêque | |
Birth Date: | 11 August 1921 |
Birth Place: | Chambéry, France |
Death Place: | Paris, France |
Alma Mater: | École normale supérieure |
Occupation: | Historian, hellenist |
Employer: | University of Montpellier University of Franche-Comté |
Notable Works: | The Birth of Greece The Greek Adventure: A Cultural and Historical Study of the Ancient Greeks |
Pierre Lévêque (pronounced as /fr/; 11 August 1921, in Chambéry – 5 March 2004, in Paris) was a 20th-century French historian of ancient and Hellenistic Greece.
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 .