La visione di Costantino e la storia culturale dei sogni

The earliest stories about Constantine’s dream and vision before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge have always been one of those most popular research topics among scholars of Late Antiquity. After distancing itself from recent attempts to explain these famous episodes by reducing them to mere astronomical events, this article proposes a thorough interpretation of the sources. First of all it analyses mnemo-historical relations between Constantine, Lactantius, Eusebius and the Latin Panegyrics, thus overcoming the opposition between facts and representations throughout the history of memory. Finally, a historical-semantic analysis of the oneiric-visionary lexicon of the same sources shows that in order to understand the meaning of Constantine’s dream and vision it is necessary to contextualize the sources within the pagan-Christian polemic on oracular divination and, in particular, look at the fourth-century process which led first to the domestication and then to the Christian appropriation of the ancient ritual of incubation.