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Together with Jean-Pierre Vernant, Detienne is one of the prominent French scholars of classical and archaic Greece, who sought to combine an anthropological approach informed by structuralism of Levi-Strauss, with traditional classical philology.

He received his Doctorat en sciences religieuses at the École des Hautes Études in 1960; and his Doctorat en philosophie et lettres from the Université de Liège in 1965.

Once a directeaur d'etudes at the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes in Paris, Detienne continued to teach there until 1998. Having also founded the Centre de reserches comparées sur le Sociétés anciennes in Paris, from 1992 Detienne started teaching at Johns Hopkins University's Department of Classics, where he is currently (2007) the Basil L. Gildersleeve Professor of Classics.

• Homère, Hésiode et Pythagore: poésie et philosophic dans le pythagorisme ancien (1962)
• Crise agraire et attitude religieuse chez Hésiode (1963)
• De la pensée religieuse à la pensée philosophique (1963)
• The Gardens of Adonis (1977; 2nd ed. 1994)
• Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society (with Jean-Pierre Vernant, 1978)
• Dionysos Slain (1979)
• The Creation of Mythology (1986)
• L' écriture d' Orphée (1989, English trans. by Janet Lloyd, The Writing of Orpheus: Greek Myth in Cultural Context, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003)
• La vie quotidienne des dieux grecs (with Giulia Sissa, 1989. English translation, by Janet Lloyd, is from Stanford UP, 2000)
• Dionysos at Large (Harvard University press, 1989)
• The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks (with Jean-Pierre Vernant et al., Univ. of Chicago press, 1989)
• The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece (1996)
• Apollon le couteau à la main (1998)

As editor or co-editor:

• Les savoirs de l' écriture en Grèce ancienne (1992)
• Transcrire les mythologies: tradition, écriture, historicité (1994)
• Destin de Meurtriers (1996)
• Comparative Anthropology of Ancient Greece( due out in July 2007 from Harvard University Press)