DACIER, Anne Lefèvre (trans.); HOMER.

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L'Iliade [and] L'Odysée, traduite en françois, avec des remarques. First Dacier editions, extra-illustrated, in beautifully preserved early 18th-century morocco bindings. This exceptional set features the full suite of Picart plates, not issued in all copies of the Iliad, two folding plates depicting the Shield of Achilles from Boivin's Apologie d'Homère (1715), and the plates issued in the Amsterdam 1731 edition of Dacier's Odyssey.Dacier's celebrated French translations of the Iliad and Odyssey, the first Homeric translations by a woman, cemented her place among the foremost classical scholars of her day. The only daughter of the noted Hellenist Tanneguy Lefèvre, Dacier (c.1654–1720) began translating classical authors at an early age, first Callimachus and later the poems of Anacreon and Sappho. In 1683 she married her father's protégé André Dacier, a member of the French Academy who also produced numerous translations, though generally acknowledged to be inferior to his wife's. She was a staunch champion of Homer in the Ancients and Moderns debate, defending his works against what she regarded as the contemporary decline in literary taste. Despite literary feuds with figures including Antoine Houdar de La Motte and Thémiseul de Saint-Hyacinthe, and her differences with Alexander Pope, with whom she fundamentally disagreed over the proper approach to translating Homer, she was held in exceptionally high esteem by her contemporaries. Even those with whom she quarrelled "dem

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