My Research Interests
Academically, I would describe myself as a cultural historian of the ancient Greek and Roman world. More specifically, my research explores how religious knowledge, authority, and truth were produced, communicated, and negotiated in the ancient Greek and Roman world. Combining approaches from Ancient History, Classics, Religious Studies and Social Anthropology, I am particularly interested in the media through which religious ideas circulated and the ways in which different forms of communication shaped political, religious, and intellectual discourse.
Much of my work so far has focused on religious poetry, especially pseudepigraphic texts attributed to mythical figures. Rather than concentrating primarily on the philological reconstruction of these texts, however, I investigate how their attributed authorship created authority, how they functioned within broader cultural and political debates, and how they contributed to the production and negotiation of religious knowledge.
More generally, I explore how authority and expertise were established, challenged, and transformed through different media—from oral performance to writing, books, and other forms of communication. My research therefore seeks to understand how religious communication shaped ancient societies and influenced wider processes of political, cultural, and intellectual change.
Central to my research are therefore questions such as: Who was recognised as a legitimate producer of knowledge? How were competing claims to authority and truth negotiated within public discourse? Through which media did ideas circulate, how did these media influence their reception, and what role did these processes play in broader political, cultural, and intellectual transformations?
Sibylline Oracles and Apollo in the Transition from Republic to Principate
In 2021, I completed my PhD on the role of the Sibylline Oracles and the god Apollo during the crisis of the Late Republic and the early years of the Augustan Principate. More broadly, the project explored how religious authority was created, negotiated, and appropriated during one of the most transformative periods of Roman history. In my thesis, I challenge the widely held view that Apollo was Augustus’s personal patron deity. Instead, I argue that Apollo maintained a close and long-standing relationship with one of Rome’s most influential priestly colleges, the quindecimviri sacris faciundis, which was responsible for safeguarding the famous Sibylline Books. These books contained oracles whose divine authority gave them considerable political significance and enabled their messages to circulate widely among the Roman population.
During the Republican period, the quindecimviri exercised firm control over the Sibylline Books and the authority invested in their oracles. However, as a consequence of the political struggles of the Late Republic, the priesthood gradually lost that control, and the authority of the oracles was repeatedly appropriated by competing political actors. Augustus eventually re-established this authority by restoring the priesthood and transferring the Sibylline Books to a purpose-built library within the newly constructed Temple of Apollo on the Palatine, located immediately adjacent to his private residence.
My first monograph therefore offers a comprehensive reassessment not only of the significance of the Sibylline Books in Late Republican and Augustan Rome, but also of Apollo’s relationship with Rome’s first emperor and the broader mechanisms through which religious authority was negotiated during a period of profound political transformation. More generally, it demonstrates how control over religious texts and institutions could become an important instrument of political power.
The book was published in 2022 in the well-respected series Studien zur Alten Geschichte by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht (Verlag Antike), now an imprint of De Gruyter Brill. Closely related to this project, I have also published research on the role of the sanctuary of Delphi in the Roman Republic, as well as on the relationship between the pagan Sibylline Oracles and their Judeo-Christian counterparts, the Oracula Sibyllina.
Divine Messages from Mortal Pen: Pseudepigraphic Oracles and their Disseminators in Athens from the 6th to the 4th Century BCE
Following the publication of my first monograph, I was awarded a competitive three-year research grant by the German Research Foundation (DFG) for the project “Divine Messages from Mortal Pen: Pseudepigraphic Oracles and their Disseminators in Athens from the 6th to the 4th Century BCE”. Building on my earlier work on religious authority in Republican Rome and the early Principate, this project shifted the focus to Archaic and Classical Greece and explored how pseudepigraphic oracles and other forms of religious poetry functioned as media of religious communication.
Rather than concentrating solely on the texts themselves, the project investigated how texts attributed to mythical figures such as Orpheus, Musaios, Bakis, the Sibyl, Epimenides, Abaris, and Aristeas were disseminated, embedded, and received within broader political, religious, and intellectual discourses. By examining the interaction between oral performance and writing, the project sought to better understand how religious authority and competing claims to knowledge and truth were negotiated in the democratic society of Archaic and Classical Athens.
The project is currently being brought to completion with a second monograph, which synthesises its principal findings and further develops their broader theoretical implications for the study of religious communication, authority, and knowledge in the ancient world.
Alongside the monograph, I also co-organised two international conferences. The first conference, Religion on the Verge of Orality and Literacy (2024), examined the complex relationship between spoken and written forms of religious communication across the ancient world, while the second, Divination and Authority in Greco-Roman Antiquity (2025), explored the relationship between religious authority and divination in the Greek and Roman worlds. Both conferences will result in edited volumes that further develop and broaden the interdisciplinary perspectives emerging from this research.
Future Research
Building on these projects, my future research will increasingly shift from the study of religious pseudepigraphy towards a broader investigation of the production, communication, and negotiation of knowledge in the ancient world. More generally, it will seek to overcome modern disciplinary boundaries by examining religion, philosophy, early science, and divination as interacting forms of knowledge within shared historical discourses rather than as isolated intellectual traditions.
A particular focus will be the emergence of early Greek philosophy and science within the wider religious and intellectual culture of Archaic and Classical Greece. Rather than treating these developments as a simple transition from religion to rationality, my research will investigate the complex ways in which traditional religious media, practices, and forms of authority shaped the very conditions under which new forms of knowledge emerged.
More broadly, my future work will examine how authority, expertise, and competing claims to truth were negotiated across different forms of communication, and how media and materiality influenced these processes. By bringing the study of ancient religion into closer dialogue with Religious Studies, Media Studies, the History of Science, Sociology, and Social Anthropology, it will contribute to a more integrated understanding of ancient knowledge cultures.