L'Archeologie Dans L'Antiquite: Tourisme, Lucre Et Decouvertes

Archaeology fascinates our contemporaries to the point of striving to be deemed a science. It is not, however, “an invention of modern curiosity,” as E. Egger wrote in 1846. Such is the subject of this book, which sheds new light on all data related to archaeological tourism in antiquity, on the revelations which natural disasters and human works have conveyed to Greeks and Romans about their past, and on excavations too frequently motivated by greed (treasure hunts), yet which also may have inspired the quest for instructive archaeological remains. People knew how to recognise archaic-style idols in temples. The sense of documenting new finds and a passion for ancient monuments sometimes went hand-in-hand with a nostalgia for the past. In bygone times, this was, and still is today, a problem of civilisation of as much interest to philosophers as it is to historians in general and archaeologists in particular. This work has gathered and formulated, for the very first time, available data on how the Ancients perceived the vestiges of their own antiquity.