Biographical profile
Professor of Greek and Latin Philology at the University of Bari, Department of Ancient Sciences, Faculty of Letters and Philosophy.
He is a member of the Scientific Council of the Gramsci Foundation, of the Advisory Committee of the National Research Council and of the Society for Classical Tradition (Boston).
He presides over the cultural association “Socrates”. He is a member of the scientific committee of History and criticism(Santiago, Spain), Journal of Classical Traditions (Boston), Limes (Rome) and Philosophy of human rights (Rome). He is a member of the Association pour l'encouragement des Etudes Grecques (Paris, Sorbonne) and of the directorate of the Andreas Mustoxidis Foundation of Corfu.
He directs the journal Quaderni di storia, and the series of classics The ancient city (Sellerio) and Paradosis (Dedalo).
He studied problems of ancient history, Greek and Roman literature, history of tradition, history of classical studies, politics and culture from the Reformation to the European twentieth century.
Main publications
Among other things, he published a radical reinterpretation of the history of the library of Alexandria: The missing library (Sellerio), translated into French, German, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Neo-Greek, Japanese.
In the field of histories of classical literature he has written one for Laterza History of Greek Literature (2001, translated into French and Czech: Dejiny recke literatury) to The classics in the history of Latin literature; for the Salerno publishing house he edited the volumes: The Literary Space of Ancient Greece.
In the field of biography he wrote about Thucydides (Adelphi), translated into French, on Lucretius(Sellerio) and, recently, on Caesar, the democratic dictator (Laterza 2000), translated into Spanish (Ariel), French (Flammarion), German (Beck), Portuguese (Estado Libertade, Sao Paulo).
It was published in 2000 Ah, Aristotle! (Europäische Verlagsanstalt /Rotbuch), with French, Italian, Brazilian translation: A dangerous profession (Ed. Desjonquères), A Dangerous Profession: The Daily Life of Greek Philosophers (Sellerio), tr. Brazilian (Estado Libertade).
Lastly, he deals with the editorial history of the Library of the Greek-Byzantine patriarch Photius:The Patriarch's Library (Salerno ed.); The Photius found (Daedalus, 2001, series of "History Notebooks", Paradosis/4), containing unpublished Latin translations of the Library by Photius. At Adelphi: Convert Casaubon (2002)
The latest volumes are: Us and the Ancients (Rizzoli 2002), Criticism of democratic rhetoric(Laterza), with the French translation: The democratic fraud (Flammarion 2003), The copyist as author (Sellerio) and the French translation of Photius: The Bibliothèque du Patriarche (Paris, Les Belles Lettres 2003).
