1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Larcher, Pierre Henri

LARCHER, PIERRE HENRI (1726–1812), French classical scholar and archaeologist, was born at Dijon on the 12th of October 1726. Originally intended for the law, he abandoned it for the classics. His (anonymous) translation of Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirrhoë (1763) marked him as an excellent Greek scholar. His attack upon Voltaire’s Philosophie de l’historie (published under the name of l’Abbé Bazin) created considerable interest at the time. His archaeological and mythological Mémoire sur Vénus (1775), which has been ranked with similar works of Heyne and Winckelmann, gained him admission to the Académie des Inscriptions (1778). After the imperial university was founded, he was appointed professor of Greek literature (1809) with Boissonade as his assistant. He died on the 22nd of December 1812. Larcher’s best work was his translation of Herodotus (1786, new ed. by L. Humbert, 1880) on the preparation of which he had spent fifteen years. The translation itself, though correct, is dull, but the commentary (translated into English, London, 1829, new ed. 1844, by W. D. Cooley) dealing with historical, geographical and chronological questions, and enriched by a wealth of illustration from ancient and modern authors, is not without value.

See J. F. Boissonade, Notice sur la vie et les écrits de P. L. (1813); F. A. Wolf, Literarische Analecten, i. 205; D. A. Wyttenbach, Philomathia, iii. (1817).