Livio Catullo Stecchini

Livio Catullo Stecchini (6 October 1913 – September 1979) was a professor of ancient history at Paterson State Teachers College (now William Paterson University) in New Jersey. He wrote on the history of science, ancient weights and measures (metrology), and the history of cartography in antiquity. He is best known as a defender of the theories of Immanuel Velikovsky and for his numerological theories about the dimensions of the Great Pyramids.

Originally a classicist, he became a student of Angelo Segre at the University of Freiburg, Germany where he studied the philosophy of Husserl, and attended the lectures of Heidegger and Oskar Becker. Eventually he focused on the work of Fritz Prinsheim which was concentrated on the contract of sale in ancient times. Had he known that in the hands of Kenneth Kitchen the sequence of blessings and curses in ancient contracts was eventually to become one of the most important dating tools of modern archaeology, Stecchini might not have focused on the clauses relating to measures. As it happened it was this focus that led Otto Lenel to allow him to read a paper on the length of miles in the Syro-Roman Law Book.

After the Freiburg group was disbanded by Hitler he returned to Italy where he received a doctorate in the field of Roman Law. He became assistant to the chair of history of Roman Law at the University of Rome and a member of the Institute of Roman and Oriental Law of that University where he was influenced by Edoardo Volterra holder of the chair of Oriental Law there.

He fled the Fascist regimes of Europe to the United States and worked for a doctorate in Ancient History at Harvard under Werner Jaeger. Jaeger suggested that he write his thesis on the concept of akribea or precision in Greek thought. His Ph.D. dissertation from 1946 was entitled "On the Origin of Money in Greece". From there, he went to the study of Greek monetary weights, the operation of Greek mints and the dimensions of Greek temples. From there he turned to the study of ancient geography and geodesy. His knowledge was specialized in agrarian measures in cuneiform tablets, rates of money exchange in Greek tablets, and the volume of jars in Egyptian papyri, cited in major periodicals such as Classical Philology. He also wrote more general works, some subsequently republished, such as his analysis of Herodotus in "The Persian Wars"

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