GREEK AND ROMAN ANTIQUITY IS SO EVIDENTLY PRESENT IN French revolutionary and imperial imagery that we are inclined to assign to it the role of a conscious model for a great number of ideas and even of institutions. The Frenchmen of the Republic and of the ‘Grande Nation’ would be, in short, resurrected Greeks and Romans, who would awaken the ‘dead world’ as Saint-Just called Rome. Indeed this received view is not wholly false or arbitrary. Perusal of the political literature – speeches, pamphlets, theoretical works – reveals that the allusions or references to Antiquity were something more than a fashion: from the ideological or cultural point of view, whether it is to identify with or get away from it, we think insistently and continuously of Sparta, Athens and Rome.