Gilles Boileau

Gilles Boileau

Gilles Boileau (22 October 1631, Paris – 18 March 1669), the elder brother of the more famous Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, was a French translator and member of the Académie française.

Boileau was well regarded as a classicist by his contemporaries and published a verse translation of the fourth book of the Aeneid and prose translations of writings of Diogenes Laërtius and of Epictetus, whose life he wrote. He received a royal sinecure as contrôleur de l’argenterie du roi, and though his poetry is generally accounted mediocre, he was elected to the Académie française in January 1659.