Les recueils de Questions et la tradition « antiquaire » dans le corpus de Plutarque.

Abstract

Recently, researches devoted to Plutarch have tended to postulate the unity of the corpus taken as a whole, beyond the caesura between the Lives and the Moral Works which owes nothing to their author. The Lives have been analyzed far less as isolated biographies than as the witness, throughout the whole history of Greece and Rome, of a new Hellenism embodying the present unity of a culture resting on two heritages, Greek and Roman. Then followed the question of the meaning of Plutarch’s knowledge and erudition from a study of the building up of the collections of Questions, of the Roman Questions and Greek Questions in particular, also of the likely Barbarian Questions. Not only were Plutarch’s working habits brought to light and explained, but even more so the meaning that must be conferred to them : what is the meaning of the accumulated knowledge of an “antiquarian” nature ; which value to confer to that practice of parallel erudition ? Lastly, the study of the reception of Plutarch, from Antiquity, has experienced a vast development as regards the Lives as well as the Moralia. On that point again, the analysis has not been restricted to one case study as such ; it also bore even more than before on the corpuses as a whole, on their meaning in relation to the periods and contexts, and on the genesis and slow formation of Moral Works.Do Plutarch’s immense knowledge and passionate curiosity about everything past make of him a lover of “antiques”, an “antiquarian” in the style of Varro and Pausanias, or of the Renaissance scholars rediscovering that heritage, like Biondo, Scaliger or Just Lipse ?

Keywords

• antiquarian
• erudition
• Plutarch
• Moralia and Lives
• reception
• Renaissance