Souvenir et utilisation de l'image des Antonins de Septime Sévère à Caracalla : essai sur la politique mémorielle à Rome
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- The Nerva-Antonine dynasty appears to modern scholars as the rulers of the Roman Empire at its peak. However, we have to take the lasting influence of Machiavelli, Gibbons and Montesquieu into account. It is interesting to question our overview of them by studying the great amount of sources mentionning them from the reign of Septimius Severus to the death of Constantine the Great. The diversity of the documents, by which clues of what the conception of the Antonines by the ancients could be are conserved, enables, if done based on a methodology epistemologically valid, to try and reach the outlooks of various social groups and their many shades. Our aim is to find out the characteristics linked to each of these emperors and to figure out how they evolved but also to determine how an imperial authority eager to use their meanngful exemple as a tool of its own legitimacy could sway their memory. This particular care for politics’ part in the building of memorial conceptions will also allow a further dive into the theoritical aspects of memory studies and to forge new conceptual ressources for scholars interested in this field.