Overview
I am interested in the relationship between politics, theory, and literature in Graeco-Roman antiquity, especially in classical Greece. My first book project, titled Cooperative Antagonism: Debating, Thinking, and Writing in Classical Greece, argues that citizens, intellectuals, and writers in classical Greek democracies shared a distinctive mode of engaging with their rivals that led them to embrace their opponents’ viewpoints while arguing for radically opposite conclusions. I call this mode cooperative antagonism. Texts ranging from forensic speeches to intellectual contests to tragic debates turned polarization into a spur to inquiry, rather than a threat to civic cohesion. Cooperative antagonism, I argue, acted as a generative intellectual matrix that constantly disrupted common sense and circulated new ideas across the public sphere.
Several articles related to this project have appeared in journals or are forthcoming. For my second book project, I will turn to philosophical dialogue, tracing its emergence in the fourth century BCE as a groundbreaking response to the dominance of opposed speeches in the democratic public sphere. I am also currently co-editing a collaborative commentary to the polymath Hippias of Elis (Oxford University Press). 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
“Paradoxes of common sense: epideixis, treatises, and antilogy in classical Greece,” American Journal of Philology, 146(3): 451–84, 2025.
“The imaginary of polarization: tragedy, assembly, and stasis narratives.” Transactions of the American Philological Association, 155(2): 341–69, 2025.
“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.
