Epic Fakes and Forgeries in Classical Literature and Philology

Homer's Seven Birthplaces and the Authenticity Problem

A set of epigrams in the Planudean Appendix to the Greek Anthology records the trope that, even in antiquity, seven different cities contended for the right to be considered the birthplace of Homer. Several are clearly inscriptions, no bigger than a couplet (Grk. Anth. XVI). The more elaborate elaboration upon this lapidary couplet at 296 is attributed to Antipater of Sidon, and approaches a more modern conception of the epigram by making a vatic claim on his own behalf in order to assert Homer's divinity (Grk. Anth. XVI). Others, like 293, try to resolve the questions about Homer's identity by ascribing authorship of the poems to Zeus himself.

The overall effect is uncanny: to realize that the nexus of ideas relating antiquity to uncertainty, to fraudulent claims and rumor elevated to the status of fact, were already present in antiquity, and that to some degree Homer's value lies in that very elusiveness. By the time of the Noctes Atticae of Aulus Gellius, the seven birthplaces of Homer would even be depicted as a standard subject of learned antiquarian speculation — he concedes that "de patria quoque Homeri multo maxime dissensum est" (Noctes III.11) — and Gellius' catalogue of the cities differs from those in the Greek Anthology, suggesting that additional cities must have begun staking a claim even after it had already become a topos, or even a meme of sorts. While Homer's authenticity was guaranteed by his great antiquity, antiquity always brings with it the prospect of fakes and forgeries. The seven birthplaces of Homer are like a metonym for the study of classics altogether: for Aulus Gellius no less than for us, the claim is like an advertisement for tourism, an invitation into a kind of fake authenticity.

Yet even to us it is easy to speculate how some of the cities on record could have staked a credible claim to authenticity: Ithaka, for example, is included on most of the lists for reasons that would seem obvious. But to stake a claim for Ithaka would be necessarily to imply a tendentious reading of Homer's own work, and a definition of epic that mistakes Homer for Vergil. One of the traditional claims made on behalf of the cultural and aesthetic primacy of epic is that, within its vast scope, there is generally at least one moment to everyone's taste. In our own cultural moment, an informational revolution comparable to that represented by the Homeric poems — considered in the terms laid down by Milman Parry as a clear artifact of oral culture making the transition to written and recorded culture — has made itself felt again. In the decades since Parry's thesis gained wide acceptance, and with the birth of the Internet, Homer has been atomized. Even the word "epic" has undergone a debasement whose trajectory is precisely similar to that of the word "awesome." Contemporary Hollywood produced a generic film comedy entitled, flatly, Epic Movie (2007), whose genre is, unsurprisingly, mock-epic; in the same period, Internet slang introduced the term "EPIC FAIL" (derived from a video game) as a term of mockery. In our own cultural moment, the proliferation of epic fakes is presumably a necessary adjunct to the possibility of real, agreed-upon authenticity.

This cultural moment has clear analogues in the history of the classical world. By the first century C.E., the texts of Dares of Phrygia and Dictys of Crete were already in circulation, purporting to be eyewitness accounts of the Trojan War — one told from the standpoint of a Trojan ally, one from the Greek. At the very moment when the Hellenistic world was forced to accommodate encroaching Romanization, the forged version of the epic emerged. After the western Roman empire had fallen, these texts were translated into Latin and embellished with additional forgeries: the fourth-century Latin text comes with an additionally forged letter to Sallust from Cornelius Nepos describing his discovery in Athens of the text of Dares of Phrygia:

Epic Forgeries in the Ancient World: Dares, Dictys, and Romanization

Cornelius Nepos Sallustio Crispo S. Cum multa Athenis studiosissime agerem, inveni historicam Daretis Phrygii, ipsius manu scriptam, ut titulus indicat, quam de Graecis et Trojanis memoriae mandavit. Quam ego summo amore complexus, continuo transtuli. Cui nihil adjiciendum vel diminuendum reformandi causa putavi, alioquin mea posset videri. Optimum ergo duxi, vere et simpliciter perscripta, si eam ad verbum in Latinitatem transverterem, ut legentes cognoscere possent, quomodo hae res gestae essent: utrum magis vera existiment, quae Dares Phrygius memoriae commendavit, qui per id tempus vixit et militavit, quo Graeci Trojanos oppugnarent; an Homero credendum, qui post multos annos natus est, quam bellum hoc gestum fuisset: de qua re Athenis judicium fuit, cum pro insano Homerus haberetur, quod Deos cum hominibus belligerasse descripsit. Sed hactenus ista. Nunc ad pollicitum revertamur.

This is quite charming in its way, but certainly not persuasive. There is no other way to interpret the invention of these particular texts in this particular period than to understand it as a response to Romanization, or even just Roman tourism — if that is the word for the strange cultural victory lap taken by Nero in the Peloponnese. The Romans seemed capable of approaching Homer and epic from many different angles. If we truly are in their position, it might be worth considering some of their own approaches. By way of thematic introduction to a collection of essays on the issues of fakes and forgeries in classical literature, I would like to think about the way in which issues of epic fakes and forgeries might illuminate our own ideas of what constitutes authenticity. Nowadays we all know that "Homer" never actually existed: yet we continue to argue about him, or even her — in terms of one of the more avant-garde interpretations of the Homeric poems advanced in the nineteenth century, which attempted to prove scientifically that Homer was a woman.

As textual criticism of the Greek and Roman classics began to assert itself as a discipline — or at times even as a science — in the Renaissance and thereafter, questions of authenticity began to surface with increasing frequency in discussions of classical literature. Anthony Grafton's article on "Forgery" for the 2010 Belknap Press encyclopedia The Classical Tradition (which Grafton edited with Glenn Most and Salvatore Settis) gives a relatively solid and sober account of the various fakes and forgeries that were uncovered in what may now seem like a golden age of classical philology. Yet the frustrating thing about Grafton's account — especially given how illuminating he has been elsewhere about the history of Renaissance scholarship — is that he tells a relatively sedate detective story without ever really talking about the crime.

Bentley, Phalaris, and the Birth of Modern Philology

A fake or a forgery is, in some sense, a theatrical performance: since it is an artifact intended to deceive, it has a keen sense of its audience. (Sometimes too keen: the legendary forged Vermeers of Van Meegeren today strike almost no viewer as possibly authentic, because they lean in the direction of gratifying a buyer's wish that Vermeers should be a bit more decorative, more in the style of Thomas Kinkade.) Grafton's article gives no sense that — in early eighteenth-century England, for example — Bentley's classical scholarship was the equivalent of our contemporary tabloid fodder, an occasion for gossip, snark, and sneering denunciations of shoddy scholarship. Bentley's exposure of the epistles of Phalaris as a forgery would have a profound effect on the intellectual and cultural life of eighteenth-century England.

Grafton does acknowledge Richard Bentley as Casaubon's equal in establishing the historical philology of classical Greek as a sort of science — as the means whereby, in Grafton's words, he "demoted the elegant letters ascribed to the tyrant Phalaris." Phalaris himself had first been a byword in the classical world for the sadistic cruelty of tyrants, although being from the Greek colonies in southern Italy would later transform him, in a tradition dating from the Roman empire, into a kind of legendary fount of wisdom like Numa or Solon. Yet at the moment Bentley exposed the forgery — already within the context of Pope's "Augustan" translations of Homer into rhymed English verse — vernacular mock-epic suddenly became the defining literary genre of the moment. Pope's Dunciad and Swift's Battle of the Books used classical epic as a stick with which to beat Bentley over the head. The great irony, of course, is that The Battle of the Books is couched as a defense of the classics against classical philology, undertaken because Swift's own patron, Sir William Temple, had just edited a new edition of the epistles of Phalaris, touting their authenticity. In other words, the great defenses made in this period of the authenticity of classical epic were done in the service of defending a forged work which has since slipped out of the canon with hardly a critical comment.

The abbreviated account of Bentley's work in Greek philology gives some sense of Grafton's overall approach. In trying to responsibly represent the birth of modern scholarship, Grafton shies away from representing the attractions of the phony — the lurid and melodramatic aspect which captures the imagination. His account of forgery in the classical tradition is like a biography of Al Capone which omits all discussion of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in order to concentrate on the minute details of the tax-evasion statutes under which Capone was ultimately convicted. Grafton is content to rehearse the relatively familiar tale of how Casaubon's historical philology of Greek could be used to expose a forgery committed in the classical world itself: as Grafton puts it, "Isaac Casaubon proved, phrase by phrase, that as Porphyry had suggested, the dialogues ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus had not been translated from Egyptian but composed in Greek, and late Greek at that." In other words, we have an authentic classical source already complaining that there was something inauthentic about the Hermetic Corpus — so why were later readers so easily taken in by the forgery?