Many new and fruitful avenues of investigation open up when scholars consider forgery as a creative act rather than a crime. We invited authors to contribute work without imposing any restrictions beyond a willingness to consider new approaches to the subject of ancient fakes, forgeries and questions of authenticity. The result is this volume, in which our aim is to display some of the many possibilities available to scholarship.
The exposure of fraud and the pursuit of truth may still be valid scholarly goals, but they implicitly demand that we confront the status of any text as a focal point for matters of belief and conviction. Recent approaches to forgery have begun to ask new questions, some intended purely for the sake of debate: Ought we to consider any author to have some inherent authenticity that precludes the possibility of a forger’s successful parody? If every fake text has a real context, what can be learned about the cultural circumstances which give rise to forgeries? If every real text can potentially engender a parallel history of fakes, what can this alternative narrative teach us? What epistemological prejudices can lead us to swear a fake is genuine, or dismiss the real thing as inauthentic?
Following Splendide Mendax, this is the latest installment of an ongoing inquiry, conducted by scholars in numerous countries, into how the ancient world-its literature and culture, its history and art-appears when viewed through the lens of fakes and forgeries, sincerities and authenticities, genuine signatures and pseudepigrapha. How does scholarship tell the truth if evidence doesn’t? As the Cyclops is munching on the comrades of Odysseus, is he lulled into thinking that any creatures so easily deceived must be too stupid to accomplish meaningful deception themselves? Sentimental tradition reads the Odyssey and identifies the blind bard Demodokos, singing his tales at the court of Alkinoos, to be Homer’s own self-portrait. But what if we thought about the blind Cyclops in the same way? How does scholarship evaluate the truth content of evidence from cultures long vanished in languages called dead? How does a writer of fiction obtain the trust of a reader?
Reviews
Jonathan Klawans, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2019.08.32
Acknowledgments ix
I INTRODUCTION
Javier Martínez
Classical Fakes and Forgeries: Wisdom from Nobody? 3
II GREEK LITERATURE
Markus Hafner
Logography Reconsidered: New Issues on Cooperative Authorship in Attic Oratory 13
Felipe G. Hernández Muñoz
“Relative Hapax” in the Corpus Demosthenicum29
Konstantinos Kapparis
Forgery as Art in the Documents inserted in the Attic Orators 43
Klaus Lennartz
“To sound like Plato”: Profiling the Seventh Letter 65
Richard P. Martin
Onomakritos, Rhapsode: Composition-in-Performance and the Competition of Genres in 6th-century Athens 89
III LATIN LITERATURE
Jackie Elliott
Authorship and Authority in the Preface to Justin’s Epitome of Trogus’ Philippic Histories 109
Thomas G. Hendrickson
Spurious Manuscripts of Genuine Works: The Cases of Cicero and Virgil 125
Joseph Pucci
Artistic Authority and the Impotency of Art: A Reading of Ausonius’ Third Preface 139
Paul Reichetanz
Ea vera clementia erit – The Epistulae ad Caesarem in 1st Century ad Public Discourse 155
Markus Stachon
Young Vergil’s Very First Poetic Exercises: Some Remarks on the Pseudo-Vergilian Liber Distichon (AL 250-257 Sh. B. = AL 256-263 R.) 173
IV LATE ANTIQUE AND EARLY CHRISTIAN WORKS
Christina Abenstein
Facts, Fakes or Fiction? Considering Ancient Quotations 187
Frederic Clark
Historia and Fabula: Dares Phrygius between Truth and Fiction in the Twelfth Century 201
Luca Grillo
Tertullian’s Attack on the Valentinians and the Rhetoric of Fake 217
Antti Lampinen
Forging the Feel of Ancient Ethnography in Pseudo-Jerome’s Cosmography of Aethicus Ister 229
Markus Mülke
The Author-Translator: Progress or Problem? Augustinus on the Vetus Latina and Jerome’s Vulgata 245
V EPIGRAPHY
Caroline Barron
Latin Inscriptions and the Eighteenth-Century Art Market 265
Alison E. Cooley
Fakes, Forgeries and Authenticity: The curious case of Flora 285
Fritz Graf
Phantom Travels: On the Story of a Lycian Inscription 291
Abstracts 303
Contributors 311
Indices 317
Index locorum 317
General Index 319
