Dino Piovan

The most important debate about Athenian liberty and democracy in 20th-century Italy took place during the Fascism (1922-1943), when the cult of ancient Rome was an essential part of the official ideology, whereas the cultural legacy of ancient Greece was often underestimated. Some outstanding scholars took part in this dispute, among whom the names of Gaetano De Sanctis and of some of his most talented pupils (Aldo Ferrabino, Arnaldo Momigliano, Piero Treves) stand out. In their works, the interpretation of Thucydides played a crucial role, especially with respect of some recurring themes, such as the meditation on the nature of power, the relation between force and justice, ethics and politics, the public rhetoric and its manipulations. The paper aims at precisely presenting the different ways in which Thucydides had been interpreted in early 20th-century Italy, focusing on three different scholars: Gaetano De Sanctis, Aldo Ferrabino and Arnaldo Momigliano

Ancient Athens has long been considered a bright model by the European culture in many fields except in politics for its democratic regime. A very good example of this negative evaluation is provided by the political scientist Giovanni Sartori for whom ancient democracy does not fit to modern age nor is desirable. This trend seems to have changed in XXI century due to the crisis of modern representative democracy; the essay discusses some recent, academic and non-academic works of political science and political theory that look at the ancient democracy as a political paradigm and sometimes suggest introducing some typical Athenian institutions such as sortition and direct democracy.

The modern rediscovery of classical Athenian democracy is a non-linear and non-univocal phenomenon that ends up touching political theory as well. On the one hand, strongly critical positions can still be found in the second half of the twentieth century in Isaiah Berlin, who presents an excessively reductive vision of Athenian democracy, probably conditioned by the climate of confrontation typical of the Cold War. The subsequent era, on the other hand, has experienced a significant enhancement, as shown by the work of John Dunn, who distinguishes democracy as a form of government from democracy as a political value: while the first dimension records an undeniable difference between ancient and modern democracy, the second is also constitutive of modern one based on the principle of representation. This dimension of ancient democracy is also recovered by the French philosopher Jacques Rancière. Finally, the essay analyses the theses of the anarchic-libertarian anthropologist David Graeber, who criticizes the appropriation of Athenian democracy by the partisans of the so-called "Western tradition" as an ethnocentric construction.

This essay aims to analyze the passages of Lysias’s funeral speech (Lys. 2) that deal with the dramatic events of the 405-403 BC, from the Aegospotamoi battle to the democratic restoration. The principal intent is to underline continuity with and differences from the other narrations of the same events in the Lysianic corpus; in particular there will be important to compare these passages with the speech Against Eratosthenes (Lys. 12) and the one Against Agoratus (Lys. 13), in which the speaker, who is Lysias himself in the first case and a client of him in the second one, gives an interpretation of the Athenian stasis (indeed a civil war) from a democratic point of view. An important passage is Lys. 2.58, where the Athenian defeat in the Peloponnesian war seems to be attributed to the «fault (κακία) of the commander». Τhe scholars argue about the meaning of the word κακία here; my point is that it is used not just as ‘incompetence’ but as ‘wickedness’, recalling the idea that the crucial battle at Aegospotami was lost for treason.

In this paper I intend to provide an in-depth analysis ofThu- cydides' account of war in the third section of his Xyngraphé. Despite most of his early commentators accused him of a certain obscurity, the notions of polemos and stasis he introduces in this text deserve to be discussed and give a number of insights into the problem of war inWestern culture. My core argument is that there is a clear analogy betweenThucydides' concept of stasis andWeil's reflexions on totalitarianism. In this perspective, a long period of stasis leads to the rise of a party, whose goal is to take power through violence and propaganda as a manipulation of language.

This essay deals with the reconciliation in Athens after the civil war between democrats and oligarchs at the end of the fifth century BCE. Paper published in Dike. Ovvero della giustizia tra l’Olimpo e la Terra («Classici contro» n. 15), a cura di A. Camerotto e F. Pontani, Mimesis, Milano 2020, pp. 127-136.

Greek translation of "Atene o l’utopia della democrazia", printed in the book ΟΥΤΟΠΊΑ (ΕΥΡΏΠΗ). Ή πώς να γίνουμε ευρωπαίοι πολίτες, Italian edition by A. Camerotto and F. Pontani, Greek edition by Nikos G. Moschonas, ΕΚΔΟΣΕΙΣ ΓΚΟΝΗ, Athens 2020.

The paper intends to reconsider the comparison between ancient and modern democracy that most scholars today prefer normally to avoid doing or do very hastily. Of course, all people know that the word ‘democracy’ comes from ancient Greek and that its etymological meaning is kratosof the demos, i.e. ‘power of the people’. It is also very frequent that they pay homage to the ancient origin of democracy, but they normally add immediately afterwards that classical Athens was a direct democracy, which is impossible to achieve today. I will recall some of the most distinctive features of Athenian classical democracy like participation, equality, lot and elections, how they worked in daily life, and dedicate a paragraph to the famous lecture by Benjamin Constant, The liberty of ancient compared to that of modern(1819), that became canonical to define modern democracy in comparison with the ancient one. In the end I will try to sketch which positive contribute the study of ancient democracy could do to answer to the crisis of contemporary democracy.

The essay deals with the question whether the classical Athenian democracy could be considered a rule of law, in which the resolutions of popular Assembly are subject to law, or a rule of people, in which the Assembly decides without any check according to its own will. Some contemporary scholars, like Mogens Herman Hansen, maintain that
an important change from the rule of people to the rule of law happens between V and IV century BC; but this opinion cannot be shared because there are not so significant differences between the V-century democracy and that the IV-century one.

Anche se di partiti in Atene classica si è molto parlato nella storiografia moderna già a partire dalla fine del XVIII secolo e talvolta si ricorra tuttora a questo concetto, in realtà di raggruppamenti politici omogenei, univoci e compatti non vi è traccia. La ragione principale va cercata  nella natura della demokratia in cui il popolo esercita direttamente il governo della comunità cittadina senza delegare il suo kratos ad alcuna rappresentanza intermedia. Se con demos si debba intendere tutto il popolo o solo una sua parte, maggioritaria e povera, è oggetto di controversia tra i fautori e i critici della democrazia antica.

In this paper I intend to provide an analysis of Thucydides's account of war in the third section of his historical work (3.82-83). Despite some of his early commentators accused him of a certain obscurity, the notions of polemos and stasis he introduces in this text deserve to be discussed and can give a number of insights into the problem of civil war in Western history. My core argument is that there is a clear analogy between Thucydides's concept of stasis, from one hand, and Simone Weil's reflexions on totalitarianism and Klemperer's notebook on Nazi language, from the other hand. In this perspective, not only violence but also propaganda as a manipulation of language are important characteristics of stasis.

This essay compares ancient and modern democracies in some fundamental aspects such as partecipation, election, role of leaders and function of representation. A main point is that the differences are not entirely and not principally motivated by the different size of ancient and modern democracies but that representation system was a solution thought to avoid the predominance of common people; this can be said both for the French thinker Constant, for the American Founding Father Madison and also for the mainstreaming contemporay political science. Therefore modern democracy may be called a mixed government, which has an oligarchic and a democratic element. Then two ways for solving modern crisis of democracy are shortly examinated, deliberation and participation.

L'orazione di Lisia Contro Simone (Lysias Against Simon, Lys. 3), che verte attorno ad un triangolo amoroso tutto al maschile, permette di intravvedere uno spaccato delle relazioni omoerotiche poco noto; infatti il giovane di cui sia l'accusatore sia l'accusato sono innamorati sembra situato nell'ambigua zona di frontiera tra eromenos e prostituzione

Con parole alate. Autori, testi e contesti della letteratura greca. Volume 1: Dall'età arcaica a Erodoto. Link: https://www.zanichelli.it/ricerca/prodotti/conparolealate
Da Omero alla tarda antichità, la civiltà greca fonda la storia letteraria, culturale e ideologica dell'Occidente. Epica e lirica, filosofia e storiografia, tragedia e commedia, oratoria e romanzo: grazie a questi modelli si è plasmato il nostro modo di leggere, interpretare e raccontare il mondo.
La tradizione classica ha coinvolto intellettuali e pensatori in un'infinita serie di riprese, dalla letteratura alla filosofia al cinema. Con parole alate offre gli strumenti per capire come e perché non smettiamo di riproporre e riscrivere, variandoli, gli antichi testi greci.
Tutti i testi sono commentati. Studiare la letteratura greca significa misurarsi con i testi e saperli leggere. L'antologia, con tutti i brani commentati, ci guida nella complessità, senza sconti. I commenti aiutano a comprendere i generi della letteratura greca nel loro nascere ed evolversi: sul piano linguistico, stilistico, storico-culturale.

The book focuses attention on the reception of Thucydides in XIX Century Germany and first-half-XX Century Italy, when and where Historicism culminated, and examines some major historians and classical scholars of this age, that is the German L. Ranke and E. Meyer and the Italian G. De Sanctis, A. Ferrabino and A. Momigliano; these Italian scholars had a different relationship with the philosophy of B. Croce and different reactions to Fascism.
Gli storici europei hanno per molto tempo considerato Tucidide come il padre fondatore della propria disciplina, modello inarrivabile di ricerca severa e inflessibile della verità, capace come nessun altro di interpretare i fatti al di là delle apparenze. Quasi un culto, che ha avuto il suo culmine nella storiografia tedesca dell'Ottocento e del primo Novecento nell'epoca dello storicismo, riassumibile nei nomi di Leopold von Ranke ed Eduard Meyer, e che conobbe una stagione ricca ma più problematica nell’Italia tra le due guerre mondiali, quando antichisti come Gaetano De Sanctis, Aldo Ferrabino e Arnaldo Momigliano pensarono la storia antica in un rapporto dialettico con lo storicismo di Benedetto Croce. La ricezione di Tucidide si rivela così una sorta di prisma che permette di ripensare alla storia degli studi classici italiani nel nostro paese in una fase caratterizzata, per un verso, dalla dialettica tra storici dell'antichità e filosofia crociana, per l'altro, da un clima politico sempre più autoritario.

[English Abstract] This is a study of Lysias' representation of the Athenian civil war (405-403 BCE), and in particular of the speaker's argumentation in some speeches (especially 12, 13 and 25 but also, shortly, 2, 16, 18, 26, 30 and 31). Lysias' rhetorical strategies in those speech are carefully reconstructed and analyzed in their legal context and at the same time integrated in the climate of post-war Athens, in which civic reconciliation was a main goal. Therefore Lysias is seen to consciously contribute to the construction of a collective memory of the traumatic past with different strategies, by demonizing the Thirty tirants, by downplaying the entanglement of the Three Thausends who had supported them and by omitting the role of Sparta in the reconciliation. Different methods and disciplines integrated each other throughout these analyses: philology, rhetorics, law and history.
[Italian] Dopo una lacerante guerra civile che ha diviso Atene tra il regime oligarchico appoggiato da Sparta e la resistenza democratica, nel settembre del 403 le due parti siglano i patti di riconciliazione e giurano per l'avvenire di «non rinfacciare il passato». È la prima amnistia politica della storia occidentale, in cui il divieto di ricordare equivale all'obbligo di non vendicarsi per le tante ingiustizie patite nemmeno attraverso rappresaglie giudiziarie. Un obbligo di oblio difficile da rispettare per le vittime dei Trenta tiranni; con esso tuttavia l'oratoria giudiziaria di Lisia, maestro insuperato del genere, deve costantemente confrontarsi. Il libro analizza i diversi racconti lisiani sul terribile biennio 405-403, che ha visto per Atene un rapido susseguirsi di catastrofi (dalla disfatta di Egospotami all'assedio, alla sconfitta nella guerra contro Sparta, all'abolizione della democrazia), anzitutto collocando ogni orazione nel suo originario contesto forense; nel contempo si mette in luce la perizia dell'oratore-logografo nel costruire una narrazione accettabile per la numerosa e variegata giuria popolare, in cui accanto agli ex partigiani democratici potevano sedere anche gli ex sostenitori dell'oligarchia. Lisia, così spesso accusato in passato di opportunismo e cinica manipolazione della verità, si rivela in realtà un interprete straordinariamente abile della necessità collettiva di rielaborare quegli eventi funesti senza riaprire i traumi della guerra civile. Il confronto serrato con le altre fonti disponibili, storiografiche ed oratorie, svela infatti una strategia molto accorta riguardo a cosa ricordare e cosa dimenticare. Contro i fraintendimenti e le semplificazioni che hanno spesso in passato ostacolato la comprensione dell'oratoria da tribunale, il saggio dimostra come essa costituisca uno strumento insostituibile, anche se non privo di ambiguità, per ricostruire la memoria collettiva della restaurata democrazia ateniese.

This is the first commentary in Italian on Lysias' speech 25. The Greek text reproduces that oxoniensis of Ch. Carey (2007), from which it departs in a few places. In the general introduction (pp. 9-48), some fundamental questions are first dealt with: the speech's title, legal context, dating, fictititious or authentic charachter. The second part initially focuses on the modern reception of this speech in order to enlighten the biases against Lysias in modern scholarship, which only a different comprehension of the nature of Athenian law system, given by anthropology, can remove. Eventually an original interpretation of this text is offered as a selected and ideologically oriented reconstruction of recent events of Athenian history. The commentary (pp. 66-94) discusses the linguistic and rhetorical aspects of this speech, such as, e. g., the use of argumentum e contrario and the reductio ad absurdum, it also addresses legal and historical issues, such as, e. g., the discussed identification of the accusators, the so-called 'sykophants', with little known personalities, mentioned in other sources.

Poster of the international conference, to be held in Vicenza, Chiericati Palace, organized by the Olympic Academy and Vicenza Univr Hub (19/5/2023)/ Locandina della conferenza internazionale organizzata da Accademia Olimpica e VUH (Vicenza, Palazzo Chiericati, 19 maggio 2023)

The most important debate about Athenian liberty and democracy in 20th-century Italy took place during the Fascism (1922-1943), when the cult of ancient Rome was an essential part of the official ideology, whereas the cultural legacy of ancient Greece was often underestimated. Some outstanding scholars took part in this dispute, among whom the names of Gaetano De Sanctis and of some of his most talented pupils (Aldo Ferrabino, Arnaldo Momigliano, Piero Treves) stand out. In their works, the interpretation of Thucydides played a crucial role, especially with respect of some recurring themes, such as the meditation on the nature of power, the relation between force and justice, ethics and politics, the public rhetoric and its manipulations. The paper aims at precisely presenting the different ways in which Thucydides had been interpreted in early 20th-century Italy, focusing on three different scholars: Gaetano De Sanctis, Aldo Ferrabino and Arnaldo Momigliano.

The poster of the conference series Classics against 2019, to be held in Vicenza next 5-6 April 2019. The focus is about rights and duties to be human beings. Among the speakers, historians of the ancient world, anthropologists, jurists and poets.

Presentations of the books UTOPIA (EUROPA). OVVERO DEL DIVENTARE CITTADINI EUROPEI (edited by A. Camerotto and F. Pontani, MIMESIS, Milano-Udine 2019) and its Greek edition ΟΥΤΟΠΙΑ (ΕΥΡΩΠΗ). ´Η ΠΩΣ ΝΑ ΓΙΝΟΥΜΕ ΕΥΡΩΠΑΙΟΙ ΠΟΛΙΤΕΣ (Επιµέλεια ελληνικής έκδοσης Νίκος Μοσχονάς, Εκδόσεις Γκόνη, Αθήνα 2020).