Compitum

Stavroula Kefallonitis (dir.), Constitutions mixtes. Généalogie d'une idée, Paris, 2025.

Éditeur : Classiques Garnier
Collection : Rencontres, n° 698 - Série : Science politique, n° 16.
593 pages
ISBN : 978-2-406-19008-0
58 €

La constitution mixte parcourt l'histoire politique occidentale. Gouvernement idéal ? Combinaison de monarchie, d'aristocratie, de démocratie ou autre ? Elle répartit les pouvoirs de manière variable, plasticité qui explique sa pérennité, mais aussi la difficulté d'en saisir continuités et ruptures.
The mixed constitution runs through Western political history. Ideal government? A combination of monarchy, aristocracy, democracy or something else? It distributes powers in various ways, a plasticity explaining its durability, but also the difficulty of understanding its continuities and ruptures. 

Hermann Amon, The Roman Empire Third Century “Crisis”, Leyde-Boston, 2025.

Éditeur : Brill
Collection : Brill Research Perspectives in Ancient History
viii-156 pages
ISBN : 978-90-04-74628-2
73.85 €

The years from the assassination of Severus Alexander to Diocletian's rise to power (235–284) remain of interest to ancient historians. This period, commonly known as the Third Century “Crisis,” exerted a significant influence on the political, economic, and socioreligious developments of late antiquity. This period witnessed assaults on the empire's borders by Germans and Persians, along with an acceleration of changes resulting from these attacks. Drawing on ancient literary sources and the work of modern scholars, this volume offers an overview of critical issues faced by the empire, including border wars, the roles of the emperor, the Senate, and the equestrian order, as well as issues of finance and currency. Furthermore, specific attention is given to the regions of Gaul, Palmyra, and Egypt.

Source : Brill

Vassiliki Panoussi et William Hutton (éd.), Memory, Ritual, and Identity in Ancient Greece and Rome, Berlin, 2025.

Éditeur : De Gruyter
446 pages
ISBN : 9783111197319
139,95 €

The essays in this volume consider the triptych of memory, ritual, and identity in ancient Greece and Rome. The issue of identity has recently dominated the arena of public discourse with renewed urgency, and in antiquity as in the current day, identities were created through an amalgamation of multivalent views and values. Individual identities were inextricably linked to collective identifications and informed by shared memories and experiences; these in turn shaped the narratives and practices that perpetuated connections within the community. Ritual played a foundational role in this process, as a deeply felt, iterative action that brought members of a community together to form powerful memories through which they negotiated their relationships with one another and with society at large. With contributions on ancient Greek and Roman literature, politics, religion, and material culture, and with a chronological scope ranging from archaic Greece to early Christendom, this volume examines the synergy of memory, ritual, and identity from multiple disciplinary perspectives and provides both an illustration of the variety of configurations that synergy took in Greco-Roman antiquity and how they persisted and evolved over time.

Source : De Gruyter Brill

Fernando Lozano, Juan Manuel Cortés Copete et Elena Muñiz-Grijalvo (éd.), Narratives of the Roman Empire. How to Make Rome with Words and Rituals, Berlin, 2025.

Éditeur : De Gruyter
376 pages
ISBN : 9783111706931
129,95 €

Since Republican times, Rome has fostered ideological constructs aimed at justifying its conquest and domination of the Mediterranean. This process gathered steam in the imperial age, as the contributions of the conquered regions gradually assimilated into the empire.
Words and rituals represented the empire not as the Roman domination of conquered nations, but as a community capable of integrating the provincials. This was not merely an ideological construct: the new community was indeed a result of the integration of different peoples and their political, cultural and religious traditions.
This idea of empire was present at very different levels: documents directly emanating from the emperors and all kinds of literature. Rites also contributed to shaping imperial discourse, laying firm ideological foundations for the symbolic construction of the community and disseminating the imperial discourse among its members.
Words and rituals contributed to creating new mindsets that progressively supplemented the old political and social mores and customs with a new ‘narrative of empire', and vice versa: narratives contributed to shaping the very idea of empire.

Source : De Gruyter Brill

Krešimir Matijević, Rubina Raja et Jörg Rüpke (dir.), Caesar's Visions and Impact on the Roman Empire: Revisiting the Archaeological and Historical Record of the 40s BC, Turnhout, 2025.

Éditeur : Brepols
Collection : Rome Studies, vol. 2
x + 236 pages
ISBN : 978-2-503-61930-9
130 € (H.T.)

Conqueror of Gaul, textbook author, demagogue, gravedigger of the Republic, first emperor: Caesar, and in particular the Caesar of the 40s BC, is equally Roman superstar and notorious dictator, and certainly one of the most controversial figures of Roman history. Bringing together specialists of various disciplines and representatives of different schools of thought, this volume offers a fresh appreciation of both Caesar as an historical character and of a period that irrevocably turned Rome into a military, political, and cultural centre and a point of reference for the ancient Mediterranean world.

Macrobe, Saturnales. Tome I : Introduction générale. Livre I. Direction et introduction générale par Benjamin Goldlust. Texte établi par Tristan Isaac. Traduit par Benjamin Goldlust et Tristan Isaac. Commentaire par Nicole Belayche, Yann Berthelet, Benjamin Goldlust et Tristan Isaac, Paris, 2025.

Éditeur : Les Belles Lettres
Collection : Collection des universités de France. Série latine
CLXXI + 645 pages
ISBN : 9782251015057
85 €

Les Saturnales (vers 430 après J.-C.) sont un banquet littéraire fictif, lointain héritier du Banquet de Platon, qui, à l'occasion de la fête de décembre en l'honneur du dieu Saturne, réunit douze orateurs pour des conversations savantes portant sur maints domaines du savoir, à commencer par la religion ancienne. Mais les Saturnales sont d'une importance décisive également du point de vue de l'érudition littéraire, de la théorie de l'imitation, ainsi que de la réception de Virgile. Elles sont enfin une œuvre qui, quoique nourrie de nombreux éléments compilés, répond à un projet artistique innovant.