The historian of antiquity Paul Veyne, hailed for his erudition and his enthusiasm for transmitting his passion for the Greek and Roman worlds in a work as scholarly as it is iconoclastic, died at the age of 92, the editions indicated on Thursday. Albin Michael.
He had met with public success in 2015 with his essay Palmyra, the irreplaceable treasurean ode to the Syrian city destroyed by the Islamic State group.
“That his notables wear [au temps de sa splendeur] Greek or Arabic clothing, whether Aramaic, Arabic, Greek or even, on special occasions, Latin is spoken there, one feels a shiver of freedom, of non-conformism, of “multiculturalism” blowing over Palmyra. “, he wrote.
An intolerable feeling for those who destroyed the city, according to him.
Emeritus professor at the Collège de France, appreciated for the audacity of his style and his innovative approaches, Paul Veyne was also a great figure in the intellectual debate in France.
He had obtained in 2014 the Femina prize for the essay for his autobiography And in eternity I won’t be bored which traced, with humour, his career in post-war France.
In 2017, he received the prize from the National Library of France for all of his work.
Born on June 11, 1930 in Aix-en-Provence (south) into a modest family that would support Marshal Philippe Pétain’s policy of collaboration during the Occupation, Paul Veyne was a teenager passionate about the Odyssey (but not the Iliad who bores him) who deciphers the Latin inscriptions at the museum of Nîmes (south).
Perfect representative of the Republican social ladder, he entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1951 and passed the grammar aggregation. He took his Communist Party card, but left it in 1956 when Soviet tanks entered Budapest.
Freedom-loving provocateur
After passing through the French School in Rome, he began his teaching career at the University at the Sorbonne, where he was an assistant, before going to Aix, where he was a professor, from 1976 to 1999.
In 1975, he entered the Collège de France, supported by the great liberal thinker Raymond Aron. He will keep his chair of History of Rome until 1988.
Of Paul Veyne, some colleagues said that he was a bit of a maverick among many historians and professors. He assumed his image as a provocateur, a freedom-lover, a researcher favoring a multidisciplinary approach.
“When I was invited by Georges Duby to talk about ancient love, my colleagues uttered ‘ohs’ and ‘ahs’. I had a reputation for having a dissolute private life and the fact that I started talking about the history of sexuality was too much for them, ”he told the magazine in 2015. The Inrocks.
He co-signed with the historians Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby the first volume of a “History of private life”.
Friend of the philosopher Michel Foucault, admirer of the poet René Char – he devoted a book to each -, Paul Veyne notably wrote The bread and the circus, Did the Greeks believe their myths?, When our world became Christian Where Roman erotic elegy.
In The Greco-Roman Empire (Prix Chateaubriand 2006), he explains that the distinction, even the opposition, between Greece and Rome remains a “myth”: “the so-called ‘Roman’ Empire was in reality Greco-Roman”, he writes.
He strives to answer the questions that everyone can ask themselves: “Why did the emperors die so rarely in their beds? “, “Why were there so many crazy Caesars? », « Has Christian charity put an end to gladiator fights? », « Was the monarchical splendor propaganda? or — a very contemporary question — “Are world civilization and national identity incompatible or auxiliary?” “.
This mountaineering enthusiast, father of a child, was suffering from a congenital malformation which deformed his face. “I never wanted to shed a tear about it,” he said. At school, they called me “the man with the bell”. A southern word meaning “bump”. I suffered from it as a child, but I hurried to stop suffering from it, considering the people who attacked me to be idiots”.
He has been married three times. “Like Cicero, Caesar and Ovid,” he joked.