About

Adele C. Scafuro is a Professor of Classics at Brown University, with a background that includes a B.A. from Vassar College in English and both an M.A. and Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Yale University. Her doctoral thesis focused on 'Universal History and the Genres of Greek Historiography.' She has been teaching in the Classics Department at Brown since 1983, after spending three years teaching at Vassar College. Her academic residence is in Massachusetts, and she spends summers at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Her research broadly interests Greek literature and history, especially at the intersections of law, civic institutions, social life, and performance. She has written extensively on ancient law, Greek epigraphy, and literature, including orators, drama, and history. Her notable publications include 'The Forensic Stage: Settling Disputes in Graeco-Roman New Comedy' and a translation of speeches by Demosthenes. She also co-edited 'The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Comedy,' contributing essays on fourth-century comedy and Menander. Scafuro has dedicated over 25 years to studying Athenian law, exploring legal procedures, their development, and their performative aspects within Athenian public and social discourse. She is engaged in epigraphic projects, including examining the iconography of crowning in honorary decrees and constructing epigraphical corpora. Her work has been supported by numerous fellowships and grants, including a Humboldt Fellowship, a Whitehead Professorship, and international research visits. She has also been involved in teaching a wide range of courses related to Greek law, drama, and rhetoric, and has participated in various academic collaborations and conferences worldwide.

Research topics

• History
• Art
• Archaeology
• Ancient history
• Sociology
• Genealogy
• Classics
• Psychology
• Philosophy
• Social psychology
• Literature

Selected publications

• Friendship on Stone: Inscribed Narratives of the Rescue and Ransom of Exiles and Captives

  BRILL eBooks · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • History
  • Genealogy
  PublisherDOI

• Philip’s (Serious) Joke:

  Archaeopress Publishing Ltd eBooks · 2022-08-25

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• ARCHAIC INSCRIBED VOTIVES ON THE ATHENIAN ACROPOLIS: DATING THE DEDICATIONS OF ORDINARY MEN AND WOMEN

  Journal of Ancient History and Archeology · 2022

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Ancient history
  • History
  • Classics

  Sacred landscapes, like all landscapes in Greece, were subject to natural disasters; sometimes, however, Greeks could protect themselves and their buildings. N. Makris and his collaborators have explained in numerous publications how Greek architects and builders designed some of their temples in such a way that they were protected from destruction by earthquakes. There were, however, other causes of ruin: the temple of Zeus at Nemea, for example, was destroyed by human looters. Unlike destruction due to some natural causes, protecting temples from human destruction could not so easily rely upon scientific ingenuity and experience. The destruction that the Persians wreaked upon the Acropolis of Athens in 480 BCE is perhaps the best known: it is well documented in the descriptive accounts of ancient historians (Herodotus, Thucydides and Diodorus Siculus) as well as in the archaeological evidence on the ground; the case for the totality of that destruction is accepted by most scholars today. Here we focus, however, not on the destruction, but on the chance preservation of material objects in the Acropolis deposits; our interest lies broadly in the methods used for dating the oldest of these deposits, viz., the rubble left by the Persian devastation (often designated the Perserschutt in the last century); eventually, we shall be interested in identifying a method for dating the letters of inscribed texts amongst the oldest finds. The preliminary enterprise here is part of a larger project, the publication of a new edition of the archaic inscribed bronze dedications on the Athenian Acropolis.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Koan Good Judgemanship: Working for the Gods in IG XII.4.1 132

  2020-12-17

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• New Inscriptions from Thalamai (Ancient Lakonia)

  De Gruyter eBooks · 2020

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • History
  • Ancient history
  • Art
  PublisherDOI

• Justifying Murder and Rejecting Revenge

  2019-03-30

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• EUMOLPID EXEGESIS IN ANDOCIDES 1 AND LYSIAS 6:

  Verlag der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften eBooks · 2019-02-14

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Historical Readings of Oratory

  2018-11-22

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  Chapter 3 examines how contemporary historians use the Attic orators. It first considers political histories of Philip II of Macedon and their dependence upon speeches from the Demosthenic corpus, noting how the emergence of vernacular translations of Demosthenes and Aeschines in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France and England were harbingers of the first histories of Philip. The chapter then explores problems that affect historians, in particular those relating to authorship, authenticity, chronology, and bias, before describing how the orators are useful for different types of historians, such as economic, social, religious, and legal historians. Finally, it analyses problems that arise from the constraints of the corpus, focusing on the forensic speeches. More specifically, it considers the consequences of using speeches that represent a limited class of litigants and that aim at persuasion rather than truth; epigraphic evidence may at times be a remedy for the first problem, and the application of the method of ‘forensic attestation’ for the second.

  PublisherDOI

• THE CROWNING OF AMPHIARAOS

  2018-05-16 · 4 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• THE LEGAL HORIZON OF EURIPIDES’ ION :

  Verlag der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften eBooks · 2017-10-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• B C Demosthenes

  1 shared

• Andronike Makres

  1 shared

• Alan L. Boegehold

  1 shared

• David C. Mirhady

  Simon Fraser University

  1 shared

• Timothy Moore

  Purdue University System

  1 shared

• Robin Osborne

  1 shared

• Catherine Connors

  University of Washington

  1 shared

• Simon Hornblower

  1 shared

Education

• B.A., English

  Vassar College

• M.A., Classical Philology

  Yale University

• Ph.D., Classical Philology

  Yale University

Awards & honors

• Onassis Foundation Fellowship, Greece (2018)
• Loeb Classical Library Foundation Grant (2018)
• Arete Foundation Award for epigraphical and law projects (20…
• Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (University of…
• Loeb Classical Library Foundation Grant (2012)