Pitagora e la rivoluzione francese: attualità politica ed eredità culturali in un viaggio immaginario nel Mediterraneo antico

Historiographical assumptions on French revolutionaries and Antiquity and, more generally, on their culture and legacy, seen here as diverse and plural, are challenged here through an analysis of the Voyages de Pythagore, published in 1799 by Sylvain Maréchal, an intellectual who is mostly remembered for his role in Babeuf’s Conspiracy of Equals. The discussion, pursued in the light of Maréchal’s entire intellectual biography, focuses on the part of the Voyages devoted to Pythagoras in Sicily (volumes IV and V). This part is a complex composition of diverse sources both ancient and modern (including travel books such as that of the Scotsman Patrick Brydone), but it is also characterized by the distinctive mark of an original author. It reveals itself a particularly productive choice for the purposes of a non-biased detection of a critical rather than rhetorical revolutionary use of less habitual references to Antiquity.