Giorgio Pasquali (1885–1952) was a classicist, prolific in both Latin and Greek scholarship. He also wrote cultural and political essays. Pasquali held university positions in Rome, Messina, Göttingen (where he studied with Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff), and Florence, where he ascended to the chair of Greek and Latin literature in 1924. He was elected to the Royal Academy of Italy in 1942. His early philological works include commentaries on Plato’s Cratylus (1908), an edition of the Hexaemeron of Basil of Caesarea (1910), a monograph on Filologia e storia [Philology and History] (1920), and an edition of the letters of Gregory of Nyssa (1925). He is perhaps best known today for his 1952 monograph Storia della tradizione e critica del testo [History of the Tradition and Textual Criticism]. In the late 1920s and 1930s, he took a prominent role in a project to develop a series of critical editions of Greek and Latin texts, L’Edizione Nazionale dei Classici Greci e Latini (see Brillante and Fizzarotti 2021). Other members of the editorial committee included, at various points, Nicola Festa, Ettore Pais, and Vincenzo Ussani, among others.

Although he signed the ‘Manifesto of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals’ in 1925, he was a vocal proponent of Italian imperialism prior to and during the Fascist period. He wrote an article in the 1935 in the Corriere della Sera promoting the Italian imperial project in North and East Africa with reference to Greco-Roman antiquity (reprinted in Pasquali 2006: 92–105; see Brillante 2019).

Bibliography  

Latin texts

Pasquali, Giorgio. 1936. Inscription on the Arco dei Fileni, translated into Latin from the Italian of Nello Quilici. Printed in La strada litoranea della Libia, 145–146. Verona: Mondadori, 1937.

Scholarly Works (selection)

Pasquali, Giorgio. 1920. Filologia e storia. Florence: Le Monnier.

———. 1936. Preistoria della poesia romana. Florence: Sansoni.

———. 1952. Storia della traduzione e critica del testo. Florence: Le Monnier.

Secondary literature

Brillante, Sergio. 2019. ‘«La Civiltà è giunta in Etiopia» Giorgio Pasquali e il colonialismo italiano’. Quaderni di Storia 90 (45): 65–81.

Brillante, Sergio, and Luisa Fizzarotti. 2021. ‘In usum editorum. Giorgio Pasquali e l’Edizione Nazionale dei Classici Greci e Latini’. History of Classical Scholarship 3: 141–74.

Giordano, Fausto. 2013. Lo studio dell’antichità. Giorgio Pasquali e i filologi classici. Rome: Carocci.

La Penna, Antonio. 2014. ‘Pasquali, Giorgio’. In Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, 81: 573–580. Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Treccani.

Pasquali, Giorgio. 2006. Giorgio Pasquali Nel «Corriere Della Sera». Edited by Margherita Marvullu. Bari: Edizioni di Pagina.

Roveri, Alessandro. 2006. Tutta la verità su Quilici, Balbo e le leggi razziali. Ferrara: Este Edition.

Samuel Agbamu