L’Antiquité après l’Antiquité : un héritage en partage

Antiquity, classical or otherwise, did not disappear with what is commonly referred to as “the end of the ancient world”. Greece and Rome, among others, will continue to provide us with an identifiable and fertile cultural, political and aesthetic legacy for a long time to come. We moderns continue to “receive” it, to debate it, to rethink or reformulate it in our public squares or on our screens, in our books or in our language. We question and represent this past, in a back-and-forth between distancing and appropriation, and we analyse these memories on the basis of a simple question at the heart of this symposium: what happens to Antiquity after Antiquity?

To celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the journal Anabases, the only French journal devoted to the reception of Antiquity, a colloquium was organised, reflecting the diversity of periods covered, geographical areas, disciplines, approaches and academic traditions. Indeed, the study of “Antiquity after Antiquity” can only be interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary and plural. Literature, philosophy, art in all its forms and popular culture all have to do with the capacity for transformation, adaptation and resilience of which antiquity is capable. Antiquity is knowledge with a variable geometry, a knowledge that has its own history and its own traditions.

These conference proceedings, which describe the “factory of Antiquity”, explore the library of Guillaume Budé and the work of antiquarians such as Sainte-Croix and Choiseul-Gouffier, offer reflections on the task of the historians of Antiquity and the influence of Braudel on them, but also of Virgil on Giono and of ancient history on the thirteenth-century Chronica Polonorum, examine the transmission of the texts of ancient geographers, Hölderlin’s translation of Sophocles and D. H. Lawrence’s passion for the Etruscans, H. Lawrence’s passion for the Etruscans, the emergence of Etruscanism in the 15th century, and the invention of the archaeological landscape of Ostia.