Croiset, Marie Joseph Alfred

Alfred Croise was born in 1845 in the family of the teacher of the Paris . My father devoted much attention to the development of Alfred and his younger brother Maurice , reading classical Greek and Latin authors with them daily for an hour. Alfred studied first at the , and then, from 1859 to 1964, at the Lyceum of Louis the Great , having established himself as a brilliant student, and entered the Higher Normal School with the highest marks in 1864. At the Higher Normal School, he studied under Jules Lachelier , Gaston Boissier and Jules Girard , who instilled in his students - including Croiset - admiration for ancient Greek culture. Sainte-Beuve's “Port Royal” and Renan's “History of the First Centuries of Christianity” also had a significant impact on Croise’s worldview.

After graduating with honors from the Higher Normal School in 1867, Croise received the post of teacher of rhetoric at the Lyceum of Chambery , and a year later he transferred to Savoy . In 1869, he took academic leave to work on his doctoral dissertation, and in the process of this work he was caught by the Franco-Prussian War . Together with his younger brother Alfred participated in the defense of Paris, and the harsh winter of 1870, spent in the besieged capital, undermined his health. At the end of hostilities, Alfred taught for a short time at the Montauban Lyceum, but soon returned to Paris, where he took a chair . Since that time, he never left Paris for a long time, with the exception of trips to Italy, Greece and the United States. In 1873, Croisse defended his doctoral dissertation on two topics - " Xenophon , his personality and talent" and "On the personality of Aristophanes ." In the same year, he married Julie Didier, daughter of the director of the Lyceum of Louis the Great, with whom the Croise family had an old friendship. Alfred gave birth to a daughter and son from a marriage with Julie, but she herself died of the disease in 1890.

After defending his dissertation, Croisse transferred from Stanislas College to the College of Louis the Great, and from there to the College of Charles the Great. In 1877, he became a teacher of the Sorbonne , later heading there first the department of Greek rhetoric, then replacing Jules Girard at the department of Greek poetry, and finally in November 1898, after , took the post of dean of the Faculty of Philology of the Sorbonne; he held this position until his retirement in 1920. In 1880, his first significant scientific work, Pindar 's Poetry and the Laws of Greek Lyrics, was published. In 1886, at 41, Croisse was elected a member of the Academy of Inscriptions and Fine Literature .

In the 1880s, Alfred and Maurice Croise set themselves the task of writing the fundamental five-volume History of Greek Literature. The brothers, nicknamed " Dioscuri ", divided the work among themselves - Alfred had the second, fourth and first half of the fifth volume. These volumes were devoted to Greek lyrics, orators, historians and philosophers, as well as Greek literature of the Hellenistic period as a whole. Along with work on the History of Greek Literature, Alfred Croisse began publishing a translation of Thucydides' History , but interrupted it after the first volume was published in 1886. In 1891, in collaboration with M. Ptizhan, he published "Grammar of the Greek language." Croisse performed translations of the Plato dialogue “Gorgias” and “ Protagoras ”, and towards the end of his academic career, in 1910, he acted as a historian by publishing the work “Ancient Democracies”. Having retired at the age of 75, Alfred Croiset began to take up his health, but was soon forced to undergo an operation, became seriously ill in the winter of 1922 and died in early June 1923.

• Xénophon, son caractère et son talent (1873)
• La Poésie de Pindare et les lois du lyrisme grec (1880)
• Histoire de la litterature grecque (1887-1899)
• Grammaire grecque (1891)
• Les Démocraties antiques (1910)

• Lot, F. Notice sur la vie et les travaux de M. Alfred Croiset // Comptes rendus des séances de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. - 1929. - Vol. 73, No. 4. - P. 362-384.
• Croiset, Marie-Joseph-Alfred // Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary : in 86 volumes (82 volumes and 4 additional). - SPb. , 1890-1907.