Mythanalyse de La Rome Antique

The author’s point of departure is a rereading of Virgil and Ovid, namely the Aeneid as an initiatory epic on the origins of Rome, and the mythological poem the Metamorphoses. Far from addressing only Romans, Virgil and Ovid are actually speaking to each one of us: mythology is the native land of all symbolic forms. Thus, twenty-two centuries later, we can still identify with the fears, joys, and desires expressed in these texts. Aeneas confronting the uncertainty of risk and the certainty of love is the archetype of each of us trying to carve out our own space. As a homo viator, he is at once a warrior, boatman and outcast; as a founding hero, he puts the world in order as he gradually organises his psyche. To quote Paul Veyne in his preface to this book, we can find here the “profound truth” behind these “privileged structures of human imagination.”Beyond such insights, it is this very truth that the author attempts to identify more broadly in Latins’ imaginings, both during the Augustinian period and in its influences, particularly in the construction of Europe. For, in a form akin to feedback, the Aeneid is both the matrix and the reflection of romanity, the significant impact of which did not die out with its material forms. The Aeneid which inspired the Divine Comedy, or reinterpreted by Magda Szabo in L’instant : la Créüside, Ovid revisited by David Malouf, or Catullus as a possible model for Rimbaud’s “Le Bateau ivre” – even when its transitory forms no longer exist, Roma Aeterna remains, and “whatever remains, poets reinvent” (R.-M. Rilke).To better showcase this, Joël Thomas makes use of two contemporary methodological tools: mythocriticism, for his textual study, and mythanalysis, for a more general study of social imaginary-related forms. When compared in this way, the ancient and contemporary worlds provide mutual clarification.