L'enseignement de la rhétorique au IIe siècle ap. J.-C. à travers les discours 30-34 d'Ælius Aristide ἐν λόγοιϛ καὶ μαθήμασιν καὶ ἐπαίνοις τραφείς

After having forgotten Aelius Aristides for many centuries, modern philology has rediscovered this orator and writer of the 2nd century A.D. But in the Aristidian corpus, there have been few commentaries on orations 30 through 34, and they have rarely been considered. These texts, reviewed and translated in their entirety for the first time into French, with a critical edition of oration 31, have turned out to be of the utmost scientific importance in contemporary Greek antiquity research.

Thanks to them, we are able to better know the universe of the sophists in the first centuries of our era, the handing down of knowledge, and more specifically of rhetoric, which had became the main education of the elites, the cultural heritage of Classic Greece in the 2nd century A.D., the part played by the scholars - the grammarians- and of course, when we mention Aelius Aristides, the power of faith and of god, especially Asclepius, present in all human activities.

Hence the present work, at the crossroads of rhetoric and religion, contributes to shed light on the history of ancient teaching and the future of the Greek civilization during the first centuries in our era.

Jean-Luc Vix is associate professor in Ancient Greek at the University of Strasbourg.