Mario Segre

Mario Segre (born October 16, 1904 in Turin ; died May 24, 1944 in Auschwitz concentration camp ) was an Italian epigraphist .

Life

Segre studied Classical Philology in Genoa and then worked from 1927 to 1933 as a teacher of Latin and Greek at various schools. In 1930 he received a research grant from the Italian archaeological school in Athens ( Scuola Archeologica Italiana di Atene ) and won a competition from the historical-archaeological institute in Rhodes the following year . In the following years Segre took part in archaeological and epigraphic research in the Dodecanese , which was occupied by Italy at the time, but also went on excursions to Turkey. He prepared a corpus of the ancient Greek inscriptions of the Dodecanese (besides Rhodes, especially Kos and Kalymnos ). In 1934 he became a lecturer in epigraphy at the University of Milan , and in 1936 he worked for the Regio Istituto di Archeologia e Storia dell'Arte in Rome.

In 1938 Segre was forced to retire, as the Italian race laws forbade continued employment because of his "Jewish" origins. He was not allowed to give his lecture on the inscriptions of Kalymnos, which was planned for the international epigraphy congress in Amsterdam in 1938. After a research stay in London, he returned to Italy to continue working on the inscription corpus he had begun. In 1940 he had to stop his research work in the Dodecanese and return to Rome, where he lived from private tuition, translation and editing work, covered by his colleague Luisa Banti .

When the Jewish ghetto was cleared from Rome by the German occupiers in October 1943, Segre's mother and sister were deported and died in the Auschwitz extermination camp or on the way there. Segre, his wife and their son, born in 1942, were initially able to save themselves to the Swedish Institute for Classical Studies in Rome, which is considered extraterritorial, but were arrested on April 5, 1944 and deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp . Segre and his family were murdered there on May 24, 1944.

Segre could no longer finish his editions of the inscriptions of Kalmynos and Kos himself. They appeared posthumously, in the case of the inscriptions from Kos only several decades after his death.

Fonts

• Tituli Calymnii . Is. Ital. d'arti graf., Bergamo 1952 (Annuario della Scuola Archeologica di Atene e delle missioni italiane in Oriente; NS 6/7 = 22/23; therein p. X-XIV a biography of Segres [not viewed]).
• Iscrizioni di Cos . Volume 1 in 2 volumes. L'Erma di Bretschneider, Roma 1993. Volume 2. Quasar, Roma 2007.

Web links

• Short biography (Italian)
• Greek inscriptions from Kos and Kalymnos
• Letter from Michael Rostovtzeff , who campaigned for Segre in 1940