Scevola Mariotti

Scevola Mariotti (24 April 1920 – 6 January 2000) was an Italian classical scholar, lexicographer and university professor who taught at the Universities of Urbino and Rome. He was Emeritus in Latin literature at the Sapienza University of Rome.

Biography Born in Pesaro from Scevola sr. and Teresa Mariotti, at 17 years of age he enrolled in the University of Pisa and won a studentship at the Scuola Normale Superiore, where he studied Ancient Greek literature with Augusto Mancini and German language and literature with Paul Oskar Kristeller, also attending Giorgio Pasquali's lectures in Classical philology. However, he left the 'Normale' in 1940: on 13 May of that year, he publicly dissented with a group of fascist students who were celebrating Italy's declaration of war against France, on Nazi Germany's side, and was suspended from the school (also risking expulsion from Italy's whole university system, which he avoided thanks to Giovanni Gentile's intervention); when the suspension expired in autumn, he decided to leave the college and enrolled in the University of Florence, where he planned to graduate under Pasquali's tutorage. He began working on a dissertation on the authenticity of Plato's epistles, but Pasquali's leave due to a nervous illness, as well as wartime, forced Mariotti to return to Marche where he worked as temporary teacher at the Liceo Classico "Mamiani" in Pesaro (the high school he had gone to).

He eventually graduated in 1945 at the University of Urbino, although he 'bureaucratically' was a University of Florence alumnus. His dissertation, on the topic of Aristotle's juvenile (and lost) works, was prepared in one hour and delivered as a speech, with Mariotti defending it without preparing a written essay. teacher of Italian language and literature in public middle schools, and a brother, Italo Mariotti (1928–2014), Emeritus in Classical philology at the University of Bologna.

Mariotti had married Antonietta "Tota" Gaudiano in 1953; they had one daughter, Flavia (b. 1955), and remained together until his death. Scevola Mariotti died in Rome on Epiphany 2000, after a short illness.

Research activity Mariotti published his first research article in 1938, when he was barely eighteen, discovering a neglected fragment of a juvenile dialogue by Aristotle. By the time he graduated in 1945, he had also already published on Synesius (under the impulse of Nicola Terzaghi's then-recent critical edition of Synesius' hymns), Macrobius and Martianus Capella, Lorenzo Valla and was working on Enea Silvio Piccolomini.

Mariotti wrote on a wide range of subjects, including the Latin language in contemporary schools and universities and school reforms. He showed that the textual transmission of Virgil's Aeneid might contain authorial variants and wrote on the Greek and Latin Anthology, the Epigrammata Bobiensia, and technical and grammatical treatises of Late antiquity, as well as classical authors such as Horace, Apuleius and Catullus. He also studied Medieval and Renaissance Latin, and wrote on Italian literature (Dante and Poliziano).

His best-known work is IL – Vocabolario della Lingua Latina, which he completed following Luigi Castiglioni's death.

Works (selection)

Kleine Schriften

Honours

Honorary degree, Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest). Honorary degree, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Honorary degree, University of Urbino. Non-resident Fellow, Academy of Sciences in Turin, 1996–2000; Correspondent Fellow, 1992–1996. Fellow, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1988–2000. Fellow and Pro Custode, Accademia dell'Arcadia. International Fellow, Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. International Fellow, British Academy, 1989–2000. International Fellow, Polish Academy of Sciences. (Gedenkschrift).

Trivia

Among his peers at the 'Normale' was Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, future President of Italy.