Davide Napoli

Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow

Overview

My primary interest is the intellectual history of classical Greece, especially the relationship between political theory, literature, and philosophy. My first book project, provisionally titled A Grammar of Democracy: Antilogy, Politics, and Literature in Classical Greece, explores how a single form—antilogy, or the delivery of opposed speeches in front of an audience—travels across a multitude of cultural fields in classical Greece, creating a shared conceptual language and argumentative grammar that ties together politics, literature, and philosophy. Related projects in progress include articles on the aesthetics of polarization in Athenian tragedy, on theorizing antilogy as a democratic form of politics, and on rhetorical performance (epideixis) as a mode of philosophical inquiry, as well as a collaborative commentary to the sophist Hippias of Elis. I hold a PhD in Classical Philology from Harvard, a BA/MA from the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, and a M.Mus. in Piano Performance from the Conservatory of Salerno.

 

Selected Publications

“Death, memory, intertextuality: warrior catalogues in Aeschylus’ Persians,” Classical Philology 118(3), 291–316, 2023.

“Legal theory, sophistic antilogy: Antiphon’s Tetralogies,” in Our beloved Polites. Studies presented to Peter J. Rhodes, edited by Leão, D. et al., Oxford: Archaeopress, 2022, pp. 121–33.

“The shape of early Greek utopia,” Classical Quarterly 71(2), 2021, 467–81.

Hippias the Sophist: Texts, Translation and Commentary, co-editor with Christopher Moore and David Williams (under contract with Oxford University Press).