NICOMAQUE FLAVIEN SENIOR ET LA VIE D'APOLLONIOS DE TYANE : ESSAI DE RÉSOLUTION DU TÉMOIGNAGE DE SIDOINE APOLLINAIRE

Résumé 0

The long-held thesis according to which Nicomachus Flavianus Senior passed Philostratus' Τὰ ἐς τὸν Τυανέα Ἀπολλώνιον into Latin towards the end of the fourth century AD was deemed to be a mere ignis fatuum in an intimidatingly detailed subsection of Alan Cameron's The Last Pagans of Rome (p. 548-554). The gist of Cameron's demonstration has been swallowed down hook, line and sinker, without proper acknowledgement of their indebtedness, by Peter van Nuffelen and Lies van Hoof in The Fragmentary Latin Histories of Late Antiquity (Ad 300-620). Edition, Translation and Commentary, 2020, pp. 50-53, on the strength of their two bare pages of commentary. Yet their conclusion, which endorses Cameron's view that Nicomachus merely made an edition of Philostratus' Greek text which then passed into the hands of the grammarian from the circle of the Symmachi-Nicomachi Tascius Victorianus and was eventually copied afresh by Sidonius, its last owner, so that he could provide, as requested, his friend Leo of Narbonne with the brand-new autograph, needed to be put to the test, given the unimpressive pedigree of the argument mounted by Van Hoof and Van Nuffelen. Both it and Cameron's treatment are here shown to be susceptible to annihilation through the devising of new or overlooked evidence primary and secondary and by paying closer attention to the minutiae of Sidonius' very elaborate diction. Once more, a great deal of Cameron's ingenuity and erudition is demonstrated to be perverse or wrong-headed, with the truth laying nearer to what he purported to eradicate within the framework of his great battle royale against the concept of the 'réaction païenne' in Late Antiquity. As was admitted long ago by Mommsen, Labriolle, Courcelle or Bardy, Sidonius actually copied down Nicomachus' Latinized Vita Apollonii Tyanaei as handed to him though Victorianus' exemplar; the bishop might even have revised suo Marte the wording of that old translation in much more drastic fashion, reframing the contents that smacked too much of Paganism or toning down the elements that sounded too unpalatably Gentile to an audience of his times, thereby pushing Apollonios closer to Christianity. This would account best for the profuse yet cryptic apologies he makes about his work, not all of which are satisfactorily explained away as a mere rhetorical faint (so Cameron, more or less explicitly; silent Van Hoof & Van Nuffelen) and as a conventional topic of the Christian concept of urbanitas that held sway in the epistolary dealings of the late fourth century's Gallic aristocrats (silent Cameron, Van Hoof & Van Nuffelen).It is hoped that, by putting together a treasure-trove of late Latinity and by marshalling the full comparative evidence behind Sidonius' wording - a form of due process that never had been attempted on such a scale, let alone by a scholar conversant with the work of the Gallic bishop -, the enigmatic testimony of his letter VIII, 3. 1 has at long last yielded and began to reveal its secrets.