Antonio Iacoviello (MA, AFHEA)

PhD student - Classics

Biography

Background

I was born and raised in (southern) Italy, where I first came into contact with classical antiquity in the local Liceo Classico (an invaluable and priceless stronghold of the democraticness of Classics in Europe). I then took my BA and MA degrees in Classics at the University of Bari. I first came to Edinburgh as a Visiting PGR Student under the EU Program ‘Global Thesis’. I fell in love with the city as well as with the stimulating environment of the UoE Classics Department, and I decided to pursue a PhD in Classics and Ancient History there (with the contribution of a PCDS Scholarship funded by the College of AHSS). I held a  Jacobi graduate Fellowship at the Kommission für Alte Geschichte und Epigraphik in Munich for the autumn term 2021.

Qualifications

B.A. (Humanities and Classics), University of Bari

M.A. (Classics), University of Bari

Associate Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA)

Responsibilities & affiliations

Equality and Diversity PGR Representative, School of HCA, E&D Committee.

Undergraduate teaching

Tutorial teaching. Modules taught:

Greek 1a (Beginners’ syntax)

Greek 1d (Intermediate syntax and prose composition)

Greek 2a (Advanced syntax)

Latin 2b (Advanced syntax and prose composition)

Ancient History 2a (Greek and Latin Historiography)

Greek World (Greek Literature, History and Civilisation)

Research summary

My constant research question so far has been: what can the transmission of text(s) tell us about the social and cultural context where that very transmission took place? In other words, I envisage textual history as an invaluable tool for investigating ancient reception and cultural history. Most notably, I have applied this scheme to Greek Oratory, and, in my current project, to its reception in the idiosyncratic context of early Hellenistic Athens (322-261 BCE). 

My interests extend across: Greek epigraphy, papyology, political history of the Hellenistic age, theory and practice of historical memory. First and foremost, however, my chief research activity lies in the cultural history of early Hellenistic Athens. In my future project, I aim to investigate how early post-Classical Athens represented an actual 'intellectual supernova', and how different contexts and sources of that period can be profitably interweaved to outline a new drawing of the cultural history of early Hellenistic Athens. 

Current research interests

My PhD project explores the legacy of Classical Athenian Oratory in the political and cultural framework of early Hellenistic Athens - the period from the Lamian War (322 BCE) down to the end of the Chremonidean War (261 BCE). The project traces the earliest phases of the transmission of the Attic Orators’ speeches (most notably Demosthenes’), and their impact on the political landscape of that period. By using a vast plethora of sources (mostly epigraphical and fragmentary), this project frames the legacy of the Attic Orators within the specificity of the political background of early Hellenistic Athens. Scholarship on early Hellenistic Athens, indeed, has hardly taken into consideration the phenomenon of cultural dissemination and its impact. The outstanding epigraphic findings throughout the twentieth century have led scholars to focus mainly on issues of chronology and institutional framework. Such a perspective is particularly visible in the publications by Habicht: in his general history of early Hellenistic Athens (Habicht 2006) he devotes little space to cultural history and development of ideas. The same approach is even more detectable in the monograph by Dreyer (1999), which deals first and foremost with factual problems of chronology and historical reconstruction. Conversely, this project argues that contemporary documentary evidence (especially honorific decrees) is crucial for a more rounded understanding of how the Attic Orators’ corpora were interpreted – as well as appropriated – by early Hellenistic Athenian politics. To this scope, my thesis fruitfully integrates problems of textual tradition with wider historical issues, and it asserts the importance of text-dissemination in that political framework: the Attic Orators’ speeches held a key role in the political debate of that period, and those speeches served as actual ‘political weapons’ to reaffirm and re-define Athenian identity and democracy in anti-Macedonian perspective. This investigation pioneers the integration of evidence-based and cultural history in the study on early Hellenistic Athens, for the first time tackling the study of textual dissemination as a fundamental aspect of cultural and political history.

Past research interests

In my BA thesis, I explored the fragments of Hellenistic oratory embedded within the rhetorical handbook of Rutilius Lupus (first century CE) – an overlooked piece which sheds light on an early phase of post-Classical Greek oratory and rhetoric’s reception. In my more comprehensive MA thesis, I surveyed the whole transmission and reception of Dinarchus, the “last” of the ten Attic Orators, from his times down to the modern age. A closer analysis has allowed me to observe how distinctively Dinarchus’ speeches were interpreted, and appropriated, in a wide array of contexts. The most challenging and stimulating part of that project was the inquiry on the multifaceted reception of Dinarchus in the historical framework following his death, i.e. Macedonian Athen; this fascination eventually led to explore the issue deeper in my PhD thesis.

Organiser

'Ricerche a confronto’ seminars series, University of Edinburgh (February/May 2019)

Papers delivered

'Weaponising Oratory. The Textuality and Intentionality of Memory in the Honours for Demosthenes’, Classical Association Conference, Swansea University, 10th April 2022

‘Ubi et qua aetate collectum sit. On the First Athenian Edition of the Demosthenic Corpus', Text and Textuality, Durham University, 15th-16th July 2021.

‘How to Bestow ‘Inaccurate’ Honours. Pausanias and the Megistai Timai for Olympiodorus of Athens’, The Limits of Exactitude, University of Bari, 20th December 2019.

‘We Still Fight for Freedom. Exploitation of Oratorical Topoi in Chremonides’ Decree’, FIEC/Classical Association Conference, University College London, 7th July 2019.

‘Recovering the ‘Glory of the Forefathers’. Lachares, Olympiodorus, and the Piraeus as Paradigm of Freedom in Early Hellenistic Athens’, Annual Meeting of Postgraduates in Ancient History (AMPAH), University of Cambridge, 16th March 2019.

‘Shaping History through Stone: Purpose and Narrative Bias in the Chremonides’ Decree (IG II3 912)’, Workshop Inscriptions in Historiography and Historiography in Inscriptions. Two Sides of the Same Coin, King's College London, 28th Sept. 2018.

‘Being a Greek Community in the Western Renaissance. Janus Lascaris and the Heritage of the Attic Orators’, Annual Meeting of Postgraduates in the Reception of the Ancient World (AMPAH), University of Edinburgh, 23rd - 24th November 2017.

‘Wheat or Barley? Pseudepigrapha Dinarchea’, “Auctor est aequivocum”: Authenticity, Authority and Authorship from the Classical Antiquity to the Middle Age, University of Bari, 26th - 27th October 2017.

‘The Transforming Use of an Oratorical Corpus. The Case of Dinarchus’, Annual Meeting for Postgraduates in Ancient Literature (AMPAL), University of Liverpool, 22nd-23rd June 2017.

‘Poetic Quotations in 4th Century Attic Oratory: from the Court to the Written Text’,“Cupis volitare per auras”. Books, Libraries and Textual Transmission from Ancient to Medieval World, University of Bari, 27th-28th October 2016.

Articles and Chapters

'A Piraeus-Recovery Tale. (Again) on Paus. 1.26.3', Ricerche Ellenistiche 3 (2022).

'Exemplarity and Politics of Memory: the Recovery of the Piraeus by Olympiodoros of Athens', Classical Quarterly 71/2 (2021), 617-23.

'The Honours for Hyperides', Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 220 (2021) 33-9.

‘Poetic Quotation in Fourth Century BC Attic Oratory', in R. Berardi, N. Bruno and L. Fizzarotti (eds.), On the Track of the Books. Scribes, Libraries and Textual Transmission, Berlin and New York. De Gruyter 2019: 73-90.

Reviews

Review of Westwood G. (2020), The Rhetoric of the Past in Demosthenes and Aeschines, Oxford. OUP, BMCR 2021.03.41.

Review of Markantonatos A. and Volonaki E. (eds.), Poet and Orator. A Symbiotic Relationship in Democratic Athens, Berlin. De Gruyter, Sehepunkte, Ausgabe 19 (2019) n. 10.

 

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