Pseudo-Documentarism in Classical Literature and Textual Criticism

Preface: Mundus Vult Decipi

— ¿Y también se salvaron los que le clavaron los clavos?

— Sí — replicó Espinosa, cuya teología era incierta.

— Jorge Luis Borges, "El Evangelio según Marcos"

Housman, in preparing his critical edition of the text of Lucan in 1927, had memorably sharp words for his predecessor C. M. Francken: "The width and variety of his ignorance are wonderful; it embraces mythology, palaeography, prosody, and astronomy, and he cannot keep it to himself" (Housman xxxiv–v). Were Housman alive today, he might lack such capacity for wonder — these days, what is one German philologist compared to the Internet? On the Internet, the width and variety of human ignorance can seem all-embracing, and may push our wonder into stupefaction or exhaustion.

Textual Criticism in the Internet Age

Even so, the methods of textual criticism retain an extraordinary utility in the era of the Internet. Textual criticism aims at discovering the phylogeny of error; meanwhile computers and the Internet are engines for the replication of text. A work that might have taken a monastic scribe weeks to transcribe can now be replicated with a simple keystroke. It is no accident that "viral" is a key adjective in describing the progress of information in the Internet age — it implies replication without sense. Ecdotics, and the study of cladistics and stemmata, are precisely relevant to the way the Internet works. The only difference is that mistakes made on the Internet can be transmitted globally, and multiplied a thousandfold, almost instantaneously.

The Misattribution of a Latin Adage

Let us consider the simple Latin sententia mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur — "the world wishes to be deceived, therefore let it be deceived." A computer user in early 2008 might have encountered this tag while reading the New York Times blog of economist (and future Nobel Prize winner) Paul Krugman. A different computer user in 2008 might have encountered it in a computer game, Mystery Case Files: Return to Ravenhearst, where the words are reproduced as part of a puzzle. A Google search for "mundus vult decipi" returns Wikipedia as its first result — unsurprisingly — and Wikipedia ascribes the phrase to the Roman satirist Petronius. Tucked into Wikipedia's apparatus criticus, however — the page entitled "Talk" — one editor asks, "Does anyone have the source of attribution to Petronius?"

The words occur nowhere in the extant text of Petronius, of course. But it hardly matters: a Google search for "mundus vult decipi" + "Petronius" yields over 25,000 results. Other sources are offered for the words, on Wikipedia and the Internet generally. Krugman was sufficiently scholarly to give his source for the Latin: a novel by Alan Furst entitled The Spies of Warsaw, where the phrase is referred to, with no evidence, as "Herr Hitler's favorite saying" (Furst 225). Google also tells us the phrase appears in texts by Martin Buber and Theodor Adorno, so some commenters on the Internet attribute it to them (Adorno 24; Buber 9).

This is the troubling upshot of our advanced information technology: when a Latin adage is credited variously to Adolf Hitler and Martin Buber, to trace the cladistics of error becomes an exercise in pointlessness. In any case, the question of how Petronius came to be so widely credited for the words is easily solved — Wikipedia credits him in 2006. By the time that Krugman's readers or video game players encounter the phrase on their computers in 2008, their Google searches all lead straight to Wikipedia, and the error is perpetuated.