Dino Piovan
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Profile
Dino Piovan, currently research fellow at the University of Bologna/Ravenna, obtained the
National Scientific Qualification in Greek Language and Literature in 2013 and 2023, after studying
at the Universities of Padua (Degree in Literature), of Pisa (doctorate in Greek and Latin Philology
and Literature) and elsewhere (Institute Italian of Historical Studies of Naples, Ludwig-Maximilians
Universität of Munich, University College London). He worked on Attic oratory, Greek
historiography, the Athenian civil war, the history of modern historiography on the ancient world,
the Athenian democracy of the classical age and its reception, and the teaching of classical languages. Among his scientific works, the first commented Italian edition of Lysia’s speech 25
(2009) and two monographs: Memoria e oblio della guerra civile (‘Memory and oblivion of the civil
war’, 2011); and Tucidide in Europa (‘Thucydides in Europe’, 2018); he is also co-author of Con
parole alate (‘With Winged Words’, 2020), a manual-anthology of Greek literature in three
volumes, and co-editor of Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Athenian Democracy (2021). He
taught classics at the classical high school as a tenured teacher and ancient Greek at the University
of Verona as an adjunct professor. He is a full member of the Accademia Olimpica of Vicenza, a
member of the steering committee of ISTREVI (Historical Institute of the Resistance and the
Contemporary Age of the Province of Vicenza) and a member of the research group of the
«Hannah Arendt Center for Political Studies» (Department of Human Sciences, University of
Verona).
Abstract
The research project focuses on two different but related themes. The first concerns how classical
Athenian democracy was debated first of all by contemporaries, in particular by those authors
who can be considered exemplary for the influence they have had on political theory not only in
the ancient world but also later on up to the present day (Herodotus, Thucydides, Pseudo-
Xenophon, Euripides’ Suppliant Women, Plato, Aristotle), and then, in their wake, by Greek
intellectuals of the Hellenistic and Roman-imperial eras (in particular Polybius, Dionysius of
Halicarnassus, Aelius Aristides); the aim is to refute the thesis, often supported in the past, that
Athenian democracy was a democracy lived in practice but lacking theoretical reflection.
The second theme concerns Thucydides’ conception of leadership. I will examine the
communication strategies of Athenian politicians in Thucydides’ speeches, first and foremost
those of Pericles, the leader who seems to receive the greatest praise from the historian and who
is traditionally celebrated as the one who, with the weapons of rationality, knew how to control
the people prey to emotions. The aim is to demonstrate the limits of this opposition between
leader/reason and masses/emotionality, also in light of the theory that values the emotional
nature of leadership (the «primal leadership» of Goleman, Boyatzis, McKee).
