L’Antiquité à tout prix ? Réflexions sur les Saturnales de Macrobe

A semantic analysis of two lemmas, antiquitas and uetustas, shows that Macrobius does not look towards Antiquity with blind fervour, but with a kind of qualified respect. In the eyes of the members of the banquet of his Saturnalia, Virgil achieves perfection. By making use of previous authors, he maintained their life and promoted them to a greater destiny: the Mantuan is not a despoiler but a defender of literary inheritance. Regarding Servius, the one presented by Macrobius is rather different from the real Servius: whereas the latter took from the poets of the Silver Age of Latin literature - Lucan, Statius and Juvenal - to explain the work of Virgil, the one pictured by Macrobius does not.