Vivre l’Antiquité. Recueil de préfaces et autres textes

Pompeii, Rome, Carthage, Jerusalem, Knossos, Luxor… such fascinating ancient cities always gave birth to countless novels, short stories, movies, and comics.

David and Bathsheba, Solomon and Balkis, Caesar and Cleopatra, Claudius and Messalina, Nero and Agrippina, Jesus, the Crucified Jew and Isaac Laquedem, the Wandering Jew… such more or less historical couples are the subject of the craziest fantasies by which literary, artistic and cinematographic fiction was inspired.

Every single one of them can be found there, faithfully invited in this strange book shaped by imagination. The ancients had a name for such a ULO (Unidentified Literary Object): Miscellanea, Miscellanies, Mixtures. It is indeed a mosaic with a strange weave, of which the life of an academic Latinist and historian of the phantasmatic Antiquity assembled – often against all odds – the pieces shaped and colored like a dream, that of another Antiquity. Truer, perhaps, than the real one.