Friend and colleague of Michel Foucault, hostile to any fanaticism, he had dedicated a large part of his work in order to bring today’s readers closer to the events of antiquity
For a lover of antiquity like him, who had been bewitched since he was a boy by the Roman finds exhibited in the archaeological museum of Nmes, where he spent long hours enjoying himself deciphering the Latin inscriptions, the Calvary of Palmyra had been a terrifying sight. Cos the French historian Paul Veyne, who passed away at the age of 92he had added the popular book to his previous scientific works on the Syrian city palmyra
(Garzanti, 2016), a tribute not only to the art treasures destroyed by ISIS militiamen, but also to an open and tolerant civilization, which had been the most patent denial of that blind fanaticism.
Curious, skeptical and inquiring spirit, Veyne he had devoted his enormous intellectual energies to the aim of making the classical world understandable to today’s readers, despite the immense distance, temporal but above all mental, which separates us from the centuries of Pericles, Augustus, Marcus Aurelius. And obviously he could not bear the fury of the Muslim possessed against precious testimonies of the time to which he had consecrated his studies of him, always original and innovative. In a profound and in many ways unsettling book, entitled Did the Greeks believe their myths?
(il Mulino, 1984), Veyne had exalted the role of the imagination as the engine of culture, concluding that we are the ones who build our truths: one can well understand how much horror the murderous fury fed by the conviction of possessing the only Truth caused him .
Born in 1930 in the city of Aix-en-Provence, founded by the Romans with the name of Aquae Sextiae in 122 BC, he had very early manifested his inclination for classical studies and archeology, which had led him to graduate in 1955 from the prestigious cole normal suprieure e then to move to Italy, to the cole franaise de Rome, where he remained until 1957, wandering far and wide among the vestiges of antiquity in our country and in northern Africa. From that period also his Communist militancy, to which he had said goodbye after the suffocation of the Hungarian revolution in 1956.
Veyne’s first important works date back to the 1970s, which also saw him enter in 1975, thanks to the support of Raymond Aron, at the prestigious Collge de France in Paris. In 1970 he published How history is written
(Laterza, 1973), in which he underlined the narrative aspect of the historiographical work, and in 1976 his masterpiece Bread and the circus (the Mill, 1984): a wide-ranging research on the mechanisms of power in the ancient world starting from the phenomenon of evergetism, that is the practice whereby the Hellenistic notables, then the Roman magnates of the republican era and even more later the emperors habitually donated substantial sums of money taken from their patrimony for purposes of public interest, such as construction of buildings, the organization of shows, the distribution of food to the lower classes. It was a survey of considerable depth also from an anthropological point of view, destined to project the author’s notoriety beyond the circuit of antiquities.
It is understood clearly in Veyne’s reflections the influence of the philosopher Michel Foucault. Between the two, who already knew each other in the 1950s, a solid human and intellectual partnership had been created at the Collge de France. Among other things, they were united by the systematic exercise of doubt and a keen interest in social relations, the theme of knowledge, sexuality. Veyne attributed the merit of having revolutionized historical studies to his friend who was killed early by AIDS: he dedicated an affectionate and acute portrait to him, a useful antidote to many misunderstandings, in the essay Foucault. Thought and man
(Garzanti, 2010).
Enthusiastic about life, Veyne had in no way been affected by the rare disease that had disfigured his face. In fact, he shone in company and had been married three times. The variety of his passions is also striking: Stoic philosophy, Italian art, mountaineering, Latin elegy such as Ren Char’s twentieth-century poetry. She had significantly titled his autobiography of 2014, not translated into Italian, And in eternity I won’t be bored
(And in eternity I will not be bored). A self-deprecating statement, like a good part of the book, also because Veyne was openly atheist and indeed did not hide the fact that he found it difficult to understand religious sentiment.
Critical of all identity rhetoric, he judged the reference to the Christian roots of our continent to be unfounded, on which the Vatican had insisted so much. However, he was far from prejudicial anti-clericalism: in the book When Europe became Christian (Garzanti, 2008) had underlined the shocking novelty represented by the Gospel message, arguing that the conversion of Constantine the Great had been honest and sincere. The emperor, portrayed by many as a cynical power-hungry manipulator, in his opinion could instead be considered an idealist.
September 29, 2022 (change September 29, 2022 | 18:06)
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