Antoine Banier

The abbé Antoine Banier (2 November 1673 – 2 November 1741), a French clergyman and member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres from 1713, was a historian and translator, whose rationalizing interpretation of Greek mythology was widely accepted until the mid-nineteenth century.

Banier, born at Dallet in Auvergne and educated at the Jesuit college at Clermont, arrived in Paris as a young man and held a place as tutor to the children of président Dumetz.

In his Mythologie et la fable expliqués par l'histoire (1711, recast in dialogue form in 1715, enthusiastically received and often reprinted) he offered a frankly Euhemerist reading of the origins of Greek mythology, seen as the gradually deified accounts of actual personages (see Euhemerism). The Advertisement to the English translation of Banier's Ovid summarised his procedure:

For Mr. Banier hath renounced the common Method of treating Fables as mere Allegories, and hath proved, that they have their FOUNDATION in REAL HISTORY, and contain many important Facts. He hath most judiciously stripped them of their poetical Embelishments and Disguises, and reduced them to the plain Historical Truths which the first Poets found them."

Banier's Christian context placed these myths firmly in the tradition of idolatry, the worship of false gods.

For his translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses he wrote a preface. An edition with Ovid's Latin and an English translation of Banier on facing pages, was published first in 1717, with a preface by Dr Sir Samuel Garth and handsome illustrations by Bernard Picart. This was the form in which most eighteenth-century British readers without Latin approached Ovid:

"It will perhaps at first sight appear Pedantic, that a Book, which by its Magnificence and Price can only be intended for a Court and for Persons of the first Quality, should be half filled with Latin. But how many are there of so elevated a Rank, especially among the English Nobility, who can relish the Beauties of the Original?"

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