Les portraits romains de la villa de Lamarque, Castelculier (Lot-et-Garonne)

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Publication des portraits mis au jour sur le site de la villa de Lamarque à Castelculier (Lot-et-Garonne), dont le buste d’un haut dignitaire de l’Empire où l’on est tenté de reconnaître le rhéteur Latinus Pacatus Drepanius qui prononça à Rome, en 389, le Panégyrique de Théodose. C’est l’occasion de revenir sur cette étonnante personnalité agenaise, sur son nom, sa famille et ses relations littéraires, mais aussi sur les premiers acteurs de la christianisation de l’Aquitaine puisque Pacatus Drepanius fut également un auteur chrétien.

Publication of the portraits discovered on the site of Lamarque villa at Castelculier (Lot-et-Garonne). These five heads and busts, some of which were most certainly from workshops in Rome (stadtrömisch ), range from the reign of Tiberius to the very end of the fourth century. An interesting concentration in the Antonine period (bust of Marcus Aurelius as a child [?] and type IV head of Marcus Aurelius), suggests close ties with the ‘centre of power’ at the time. The latest of the busts, of an exceptional quality, draped in a toga analogous to that of the two magistrates of the Capitoline Museums (Centrale Montemartini) recently identified as Symmachus and his son Memmius (around 391), depicts an imperial dignitary, very likely originating from the region. It is tempting to recognize here Latinus Pacatus Drepanius, the rhetor from Agen who, in the summer of 389, delivered the Panegyric of Theodosius , the text of which has come down to us in the collection of the twelve Panegyrici latini . The discovery in the villa of a statue and a fragment of statue of Minerva, whose ties with rhetoric of the classical period are well known, seemingly corroborates that the villa belonged to the rhetor, at least at the time of the greatest architectural extent of the pars urbana , characterised in particular by the substantial development of the baths area. This is an opportunity to look again at the astonishing personality of Pacatus Drepanius, who held the highest offices in the Empire (proconsul of Africa in 390, comes rerum privatarum in Constantinople in 392–393), at his name, his family, his literary relations (Ausonius, Paulinus of Nola), and the early actors of the Christianisation of Aquitaine (including Bishop Phœbadius) since Pacatus Drepanius was also the author, as shown by A.-M. Turcan-Verkerk, of a poem of Christian inspiration, the De cereo paschali , with its Priscillian overtones.