Ginette Vagenheim

SUMMARY: In the second half of the 16th century, the most famous erudites of Rome, around the cardinal Alexander Farnese (1520-1589), tried to elaborate a rigorous method for the study of the classical antiquity, based on literary and on archaeological sources as well, and particularly on epigraphy. A vivid and long debate on the difficult question of the Roman Tribes can be reconstructed from their correspondence (around 1558), but also from other less known sources, as their notebooks. These documents show the extent of their knowledge about ancient sources and the unsuspected role played by some of these erudites, as the religious Ottavio Pantagato O.S.M. He had a great influence both on authors who printed their works, as Onofrio Panvinio, and on others who left them in manuscripts, as Pirro Ligorio’s Roman antiquities; Pantagato always worked as a «ghost writer», a way to continue to deal with classical scholarship in the troubled time of the Counter Reformation.