Poétique de l’horreur dans l’épopée et l’historiographie latines

This work aims to reconstruct the Roman perception of horror, simultaneously defined as an extreme fear and a horrible phenomenon. The study focuses on Latin epic and historiography to contrast them with tragedy so as to highlight the originality of horror in the first two genres, from which it is usually excluded. The review of the semantic field of the words designating fear defines horror as an emotion; thereby comes the imagination of horror in the sense of a phenomenon: these horrific phenomena include a few major and recurring themes, such as darkness, greatness and ugliness, themselves divided between pejorative or laudatory representations (horror ad odium / horror ad uenerationem), as well as between sacred or secular events. On the aesthetic level, horror also appears when epic poets and historians develop important scenes of violence: to account for the excessive dimension of horrible deeds, authors use amplification processes such as emphasis, euidentia and tumor, troubling though generic rules. Horror then disrupts the readers’ expected reception: delectatio combines a trite taste for the sensational and an intellectual pleasure in seeing the problems of mimesis, which emulate literature, fine arts and drama; the utilitas it conceals is essentially an ethical questioning, mitigating horror ad uenerationem and potentially dignifying horror ad odium. It finally appears that in epic and in historiography, two symbolic backgrounds structure the Roman vision of horror: Hell and civil wars.