Le professeur Johan van der Walt enseigne la philosophie du droit à l'Université de Luxembourg depuis août 2011. Le 4 mai 2012, il donnera à 18 heures une conférence qui portera sur la relation que les Européens ont avec l'idée de se donner une Constitution.

Le titre de cette leçon inaugurale : "Timeo Danais donna ferre and the Constitution that Europeans may one day have given themselves".

Vergil’s line was of course a different one: Timeo Danaos, et donna ferentes. The line is usually translated as: I fear the Greeks, also when they bring gifts. What happens to the line when one turns the accusative Danaos into the dative Danais, and the present participle construction donna ferentes into an infinitive construction donna ferre, as has been ventured in the title above? Vergil would not have been happy and every good Latin teacher may well frown upon this schoolboy attempt to rewrite the famous line from the Aeneid for our times. But for all its clumsiness, it may well pass as a reasonably apt construction of this sentence: I fear bringing gifts to the Greeks.

This lecture will deal with the question whether the fear of bringing gifts to the Greeks tells one anything significant about the question whether Europeans may one day have given themselves a Constitution. May the fear of bringing gifts to the Greeks be the same fear that has hitherto prevented Europeans from having given themselves a Constitution? And why this awkward attachment to the future perfect tense? Is there something irreducibly future perfect about giving gifts and about giving Constitutions? Is a Constitution indeed a gift that can only be given in the future perfect form of the verb, a gift, in other words, that at all times may have been given or will have been given and excludes the possibility of ever having been given and being a given?

Prof van der Walt will explore these questions with specific reference to the symbolism of giving that conspicuously adorned the birth of significant European Constitutions.