“Commonitus in quiete”. La visione di Costantino tra oracoli e incubazione

The earliest stories about Constantine’s dream and vision before the battle of the Milvian Bridge have always been one of the most popular research topics among scholars of Late Antiquity. Distancing itself from recent attempts to explain these famous episodes by reducing them to mere astronomical events, this study proposes a thorough interpretation of the sources. First of all it analyses the mnemo-historical relationship between Constantine, Lactantius, Eusebius and the Latin panegyrics, thus overcoming the contradictions between facts and representations through the history of memory. Additionally, 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 contextualise the sources within the pagan-Christian polemic on oracular divination and, in particular, look at the 4th-century process which led fi rst to the adaptation and then to the Christian appropriation of the ancient ritual of incubatio.