The thesis addresses the way in which Philostratos, writing in the early third century C.E., fashions a new version of the Trojan War in the central part of his dialogue, the Heroikos. The study will present a thorough analysis of the dialog’s sources and their use and of the parallels with other literary and non-literary texts from the Imperial period. It will also examine the ways in which this text addresses a set of broader interrelated questions such as the status and nature of the Homeric poems and conceptions of truth, lies and fiction. As a dialogue about events from the distant past known primarily through canonical poems, the Heroikos combines fictional creation with a form of criticism that goes beyond the domain of the literary to address ques-tions that were key to the Second Sophistic. The aim the research will therefore be to throw light on the text from Philostratos’ culture, identifying rhetorical concepts and practices as well as broader intellectual habits which were widespread in the Imperial period.In the first part, the relationship between the classical and postclassical tradition of questioning the Homeric poems and the intellectual context of the Heroikos will be taken into consideration, given that Philostratos’ reception of Homer was part of a centuries-long tradition of exegesis, known to us thanks to the scholia and to philosophical (Plato’s Republic), allegorical (Heraclitus’ Homeric problems), doxographical and biographical texts (e.g. the treatises On Homer attributed to Plutarch). Above all, the Heroikos can be placed in the closely related tradi-tion of questioning the reliability of the Homeric poems and other stories of the Trojan War to be seen in the writings of classical historians, Herodotos and Thucydides, and the works of sophists such as Gorgias and Alcidamas whose lost biography of Homer seems to have been known and used by Philostratos.The second part will show that Philostratos drew on a range of narrative sources in proposing the fresh version of the events of the war attributed by the vinedresser to Protesilaos: the Homeric poems themselves, often transforming and transposing motifs, such as the plague in Iliad 1, and wider traditions about the Trojan War. As we know from the fragments of the po-ems of the Epic Cycle, from scholia to the Homeric poems and other works, from mythographical treatises and from other counterfactual stories of the Trojan War (Dio’s Trojan Oration, Dictys Cretensis and Dares Phrygius), there were many different versions that evolved with time. The thesis will therefore attempt to determine how Philostratos made use of this rich and varied material. Particular attention will be paid to cases where several sources are combined to compose an alternative tale with the aim of defining the ways in which Philostratos’ choices might be significant with regard to the fictional commentary of Homeric poems he composes.In the final part, special attention will be paid to the portraiture of ancient heroes (ekphrasis). Philostratos anachronistically combined the physiognomic codes of his time with Homeric characterisation of warriors in order to reconstruct their identity. The chapters dedicated to this phenomenon will show that the art of depiction is not a mere ornament. On the contrary, it plays an important role in the argumentation of the Heroikos. The narrative parts of the dialog can shed light on its ekphrastic movements: like a physiognomist, the readership was invited to be the active interpreter of the portraitures and decode the appearance of the heroes in ways that undermine the credibility of Homeric poems.
Dans cette thèse, nous analyserons la manière dont Philostrate, auteur du IIIe siècle apr. J.-C., élabore une nouvelle version de la Guerre de Troie dans la partie centrale de l’Heroikos. Nous en étudierons les sources de ce dialogue et leur utilisation, et tâcherons d’identifier des parallèles avec des textes littéraires et non littéraires de l’époque impériale. Nous examinerons également la manière dont Philostrate traite toute une série de problématiques intrinsèquement liées, comme le statut et la nature de la poésie homérique, ou encore la conception de la vérité, du mensonge et de la fiction. Puisque l’Heroikos sur des événements lointains, connus au travers de poèmes canoniques, ce dialogue mêle à la création fictionnelle une forme de critique poétique qui dépasse les genres littéraires pour mieux enquêter sur des questions centrales dans la Seconde sophistique. Dans cette étude, nous tenterons donc de lire le texte à la lumière de la culture philostratéenne – théories et pratiques rhétoriques, habitudes intellectuelles courantes à l’époque impériale.
