Jeux littéraires et performances poétiques dans les Dialogues de Cassiciacum d’Augustin

Abstract

The three philosophical Dialogues known as Augustine’s Cassiciacum Dialogues (386 AD) deal with three major issues: the possibility of knowledge, happiness and world order. Those Early Dialogues between Augustine, disciples and relatives, set up a number of literary games and performances designed to exercise disciples in order to educate them, studying how the notion of play linked to these pedagogical exercises is associated with the production of fictions (anecdotes, fabulae), on the part of both master and disciples, while also seeking to determine the rhetorical colour of these fictions. We finally see what role they play in philosophical demonstration, and how they acquire a propedeutic function in an hermeneutical framework.

Keywords

• Epigrams
• mythology
• Palatine Anthology
• riddles
• school
• wordplays