Marcello Gigante
Marcello Gigante was an Italian Byzantinist, classical scholar, papyrologist and university professor, Emeritus at the University of Naples Federico II.
Biography
Gigante was born in Buccino, near Salerno, and studied Classics at the University of Naples Federico II. He graduated in 1944 defending a dissertation in Greek literature, tutored by Vittorio de Falco and Giovanni Pugliese Carratelli. His dissertation was on the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia. In 1947 he won a scholarship awarded by the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici, which he had been frequenting since its foundation in 1946 by Benedetto Croce.From 1949 to 1960 he taught Greek and Latin languages and literatures in high schools in Naples. In 1951 he was habilitated to university teaching and from 1953 he worked as appointed professor in Byzantine literature at the University of Naples. In 1956 he was awarded an annual scholarship by the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung and worked as researcher at the University of Bonn.
In 1958 Gigante won a national selection for university professors and in 1960 became Professor in Byzantine philology at the University of Trieste. From 1961 he also taught History of Ancient Philosophy. In 1968 he moved back to Naples and became Professor in Greek and Latin grammar at the Federico II University, moving to the chair of Greek literature in 1981. In 1969 he founded the Centro Internazionale per lo Studio dei Papiri Ercolanesi and in 1971 he created the chair of Herculaneum papyrology, which he held from 1971 to 1983. He retired in 1995 and was nominated Emeritus in 1998.
Gigante served as chair of the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Trieste and of the Institute of Classical philology of the University of Naples for a cumulative twenty-two years. From 1982 to his death he served as the president of the Associazione Italiana di Cultura Classica. In 1983 he chaired the XVII International Congress of Papyrology. In 1987 he was awarded a honorary degree by the University of Athens.
Private life
Gigante has been married to Valeria Lanzara since 1960, who had previously studied under him at the Antonio Genovesi High School in Naples. She worked as a teacher of Classics in high school and published annotated translations of Hellenistic poets. They had four children, Giulia, Mauro, Bruna and Claudio.Research
Although Gigante worked extensively in the field of Byzantine studies — most notably on Theodore Metochites and some Italo-Greek poets — and began his academic career as a Byzantinist, his main focus was on the history of ancient philosophy and the Herculaneum papyri. His first printed paper was on papyrological matters — a commentary on, an anonymous historiographical work on Philip II of Macedon's Asian campaign — and he published a critical edition with commentary of the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia. Other classical texts he critically edited and/or commented are the speech Against Epicrates by Lysias and the Constitution of Athens attributed to Xenophon. His third monograph, which some consider his best work, was a detailed analysis of Pindar's fragment 169 Schröder. His research papers on Greek and Latin classical poetry were reprinted in 2006. He collaborated with the scientific journal «La Parola del Passato», founded by Pugliese Carratelli, since its first volume and officially entered the board in 1948 as secretary.According to his tutor and friend Pugliese Carratelli, Gigante had the opportunity to study and become interested in the history of ancient philosophy while attending the weekly meetings at the IISS, which led to his full translation of the Lives of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius and the collected edition he promoted of the fragments of the lesser Platonic philosophers.
In the field of Byzantine studies, he published the editio princeps of an essay by Theodore Metochites on Demosthenes and Aelius Aristides, a collection of minor Italo-Greek poets, the poems of Eugenius of Palermo and the Anacreontics of Sophronius. He also studied Maximus Planudes and his translation of the Somnium Scipionis. Part of his papers pertaining to Byzantine studies were reprinted in 1981. He continued to work on Byzantine texts, and specifically on Metochites's On Education, until the early 1980s.
At the same time, he became increasingly interested in the Herculaneum papyri since he was a student, and he had the opportunity to meet a major expert in the field, Wolfgang Schmidt, when Schmidt travelled to Naples in 1953 to study P.Herc. 831, and again in 1956–57 in Bonn. He began systematically working on the Herculaneum papyri after his return to Naples, founding the CISPE, a specific scholarly journal, and organizing the study and editing of the scrolls though scholarships and Master's dissertations which he personally assigned and tutored. Starting from the early 1960s, he also researched the life and works of Philodemus, the poet-philosopher best represented in the Herculaneum papyri. He edited the Glossarium Epicureum left unpublished by Hermann Usener and published two volumes of his own Herculaneum papers.
In 1983 he chaired the XVII International Congress of Papyrology, which included a specific section devoted to Herculaneum papyri, and in 1993 an international congress on Epicureanism.
Main publications
A list of his research papers and reviews published in «La Parola del Passato» is printed in.Text editions
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Monographs and selected research papers
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