Antoine Banier

Who was Antoine Banier?

The abbé Antoine Banier, 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 he offered a frankly Euhemerist reading of the origins of Greek mythology, seen as the gradually deified accounts of actual personages. 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.