In Forgers and Critics, Anthony Grafton provides a wide-ranging exploration of the links between forgery and scholarship. Labeling forgery the “criminal sibling” of criticism, Grafton describes a panorama of remarkable individuals—forgers from classical Greece through the recent past—who produced a variety of splendid triumphs of learning and style, as well as the scholarly detectives who honed the tools of scholarship in attempts to unmask these skillful fakers. In the process, Grafton discloses the extent, the coherence, and the historical interest of two significant and tightly intertwined strands in the Western intellectual tradition.
In Forgers and Critics, Anthony Grafton provides a wide-ranging exploration of the links between forgery and scholarship. Labeling forgery the “criminal sibling” of criticism, Grafton describes a panorama of remarkable individuals—forgers from classical Greece through the recent past—who produced a variety of splendid triumphs of learning and style, as well as the scholarly detectives who honed the tools of scholarship in attempts to unmask these skillful fakers. In the process, Grafton discloses the extent, the coherence, and the historical interest of two significant and tightly intertwined strands in the Western intellectual tradition.
Forgers and Critics, New Edition: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship
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Forgers and Critics, New Edition: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship
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Overview
In Forgers and Critics, Anthony Grafton provides a wide-ranging exploration of the links between forgery and scholarship. Labeling forgery the “criminal sibling” of criticism, Grafton describes a panorama of remarkable individuals—forgers from classical Greece through the recent past—who produced a variety of splendid triumphs of learning and style, as well as the scholarly detectives who honed the tools of scholarship in attempts to unmask these skillful fakers. In the process, Grafton discloses the extent, the coherence, and the historical interest of two significant and tightly intertwined strands in the Western intellectual tradition.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691191836 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/16/2019 |
| Edition description: | New |
| Pages: | 192 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
FORGERY AND CRITICISM: AN OVERVIEW
FORGERY of a kind is as old as textual authority. An Egyptian wisdom text transcribed in the Middle Kingdom ends with the claim that "it has come successfully (to its end, from) its beginning to its end, like that which was found in writing" — that is, that the writer had copied accurately the ancient exemplars before him. Egyptian medical documents claim to have been found "under the feet of Anubis" or "in the night, fallen into the court of the temple in Koptos, as a mystery of this goddess [Isis]." And the high priest Hilkiah induced good King Josiah to repent, remove the vessels of Baal from the temple, and put down the idolatrous priests in the high places not by his personal authority but by that of the book of the law which, he told Shaphan the scribe, he had "found in the house of the Lord" where all but he had missed it (2 Kings 22:8; cf. 23:1). Claims of faithfulness in copying suggest, and tales of texts discovered in miraculous circumstances directly reveal, the presence of the forger.
In Greece in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., where the Homeric epics offered the fullest account anyone had of earlier history, the Athenian statesmen Solon and Pisistratus were suspected of interpolating lines into Homer to magnify the importance of Athens. By the sixth century, as authors ceased to claim divine authority for their words, they invented human authoritative sources for facts and texts. The mythographer and historian Acusilaus of Argos supported his rich account of gods and demigods and men by asserting that he drew it from bronze tablets discovered by his father in their garden. He thereby created one of the great topoi of Western forgery, the motif of the object found in an inaccessible place, then copied, and now lost, as the authority for what would have lacked credibility as the work of an individual. The historian Ctesias supported his gossipy account of Persian history — one which systematically contradicted the imperfect but far more accurate account of Herodotus — by claiming that it came from documents preserved in the archives of Susa. He thereby enriched forgers with another of their favorite resources, the claim to have consulted far-off official documents, preferably in an obscure language.
In the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., Greek cities produced documentary evidence in the form of public inscriptions recording their rights and possessions. Antiquaries compiled from local tradition, logical inference, and thin air full lists of their cities' early rulers, their temples' early priestesses, and their games' early victors. Historians and orators gave color and detail to their accounts of earlier history by quoting treaties and other documents in extenso. Temples supported their claims to have been honored by divine visitors and to have cured human ones by producing relics and inscriptions that explained their origin. This wide range of stone documents and written copies included forgeries, such as the peace treaty between Callias and the Persians, supposedly drawn up in the mid-fifth century B.C., and inspired criticism, such as the remark of Theopompus (fourth century B.C.) that the treaty of Callias must be spurious, since it was carved in the Ionic alphabet, which the Athenians had not used until the very end of the fifth century. Already, then, some writers possessed an aptitude for detecting anachronisms — an aptitude essential to anyone trying either to create a plausible document or to expose one.
In fact, some evidence from the classical period suggests that sensitivity to forgery was almost as widespread as its practice. When Thucydides insists that serious history must rest on reliable and direct oral testimony about the recent past, he reveals a sense that all written evidence was at least questionable — though the speeches that he composed for Lacedemonian envoys and Athenian statesmen have themselves, in more recent times, been stigmatized as a kind of forgery.
The first real heyday of the forger and the critic, however, began in the fourth century B.C. The existing traditions of forgery blossomed anew. Cities and temples turned with renewed zeal to inventing records of their heroic pasts; the temple chronicle of Lindos, compiled — supposedly from far more ancient records — in 99 B.C., with its list of donations including a vessel of unknown material left by one Lindos, the city's eponym, is only one famous example. Literary forgery flourished as well, since literary traditions were transformed in Hellenistic times in ways favorable to the production of good fakes. By then the principle had been established that a literary work was the product of a specific individual with a distinctive style and set of concerns. A loose canon of classic texts in prose and verse had also begun to take shape, one which identified the most excellent writers in each genre as models for imitation. The rhetoric schools trained their pupils to turn out excellent pastiches of earlier writers, especially in the form of private letters, a favorite exercise. These could easily be taken as genuine once they came into circulation. And gradually the demand for texts from this canon — real works by the individuals singled out for special admiration — outgrew the available supply.
New institutions of learning apparently intensified the demand more than the existing book market could have. In the third and second centuries B.C. the Hellenistic dynasties of the Ptolemies and the Attalids established libraries, at Alexandria and Pergamum respectively. The Ptolemies' Alexandrian library appointed poet-scholars to its staff, who assembled, collated, and imitated in their own verses the classics of older Greek literature. These gentlemen soon became known for their erudition, their zest for new material, and their many vicious arguments; as Timon of Phlius put it, writing as early as 230 B.C., "in populous Egypt they fatten up many bookish pedants who quarrel unceasingly in the Muses' birdcage." The new libraries were rich, vulgar, and aggressive; they collected hundreds of thousands of the papyrus rolls on which Greek books were written. They paid especially high prices for unusually valuable texts, like the official Athenian text of the three great tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, which the Alexandrian library borrowed against payment of a huge deposit, only to forfeit the deposit in order to keep the original rolls.
The Athenian book market in the fourth century B.C. had already seen dubious orations and plays begin to drive out genuine literary currency. But the new, refined demand for rare items naturally provoked the deliberate creation by forgery of a self-renewing supply. Vast numbers of faked texts accompanied the genuine ones into the libraries; spurious tragedies infiltrated the collections of Aeschylus and Sophocles, while spurious prose works clung like barnacles to the genuine ones of Plato, Hippocrates, and Aristotle. The scholars, headed by that patron of all later librarians, Callimachus, fought back. They apparently did not excise the texts they condemned as fakes from the canons. But they drew up lists (pinakes) of the genuine works of each major author, and identified the spurious ones as well.
Though only remnants of these critical manuals, the ancestors of modern library catalogues and literary histories, survive, these show that their authors distinguished clearly between the genuine and the forged. Genuine works of a writer they classified as gnesioi (legitimate), the same term applied to legitimate children; spurious ones were nothoi (bastards); thus the ancient Katalogos of the works of Aeschylus includes Aitnaiai gnesioi and Aitnaiai nothoi. Genuine writing, in short, had for them an organic relation to the writer who produced it — and that relationship distinguished it from forged writing, even though the latter might be retained in libraries and lists. And they used a variety of tests to identify spurious texts.
Sometimes they simply took the word of the booksellers who had assembled the corpora they collected. But they also assessed the style and substance of individual works: the author of the ancient hypothesis or introduction to the Rhesus, for example, remarks that the style seems more like that of Sophocles than of Euripides, but then assigns the text to Euripides because its "pedantic concern with astronomy seems appropriate to Euripides."
Early forgery thus produced historical records of a fairly distant, often heroic, past and literary remains of a canonical nature. Its existence, and its implications for the true value of high-priced acquisitions, rather than more abstract concerns, drove the scholars to make and hone weapons against it. And despite the critics it flourished mightily, both in the Greek world and — after Greek literary forms and grammatical, or scholarly, skills were transplanted to Latin soil — in Rome as well. The polymaths of later republican and early imperial Rome also confronted vast arrays of texts that needed to be judged and classified. In Rome too experts flourished, like the friend of Cicero who became known for his ability to pronounce that "this is a verse by Plautus"; "this is not." And here as well the bad currency of the forgers threatened to drive out the good; of the 130 plays of Plautus in circulation, the scholar Varro judged 109 to be forged and 21 genuine, while another canon included 25.
But the Hellenistic world saw more than the persistence of ordinary literary and historical forgery. A second elaborate form flourished alongside it, one that vastly complicated the traditions with which scholars dealt and enlarged the range of tools they applied. Greece had long had loose groups and formal sects, the members of which tried to live by authoritative texts ascribed to legendary or very ancient founders: for example, the Orphics and the Pythagoreans. In the Hellenistic world, formerly independent Near Eastern peoples came under the rule of Alexander and his successors, kings whose language and culture were Greek. Babylonian and Egyptian priests set out to demonstrate in Greek the superior antiquity of their realms and religions. Religious leaders, inspired by patriotic feeling though rarely endowed with a deep knowledge of genuine Babylonian or Egyptian culture, tried to preserve their traditions by giving them Greek settings, and Greek texts, that claimed to come from their oldest native gods and prophets. Jews, many of whom spoke Greek, used a Greek text of the Bible and hoped to convert non-Jews to their faith and observances. They tried to prove that the Hebrew Bible was older than, and its monotheistic revelation the source of, Greek philosophy. Those who used the Greek text also tried to show that it deserved more credence than the Hebrew original from which it sometimes diverged. The members of pagan philosophical sects — Epicurean, Pythagorean, Zoroastrian — now had to offer revelations as ancient and eloquent as the Near Eastern ones. Christians, finally, had to struggle for spiritual and intellectual authority both with all of these non-Christian rivals and with Christians of divergent custom and dogma.
In this world of competing traditions and revelations, documentary authority of apparently sacred character became clothed with a glamor it had lacked in Greece in earlier times. A revelation of sufficient age, authority, and historical distance could seem to be the genuine commands and teachings of a divinity. A text written in the first person and ascribed to a divine figure, one of his human companions, or an authoritative interpreter of his teachings carried a powerful guarantee of the importance and validity of its contents — one that no text by an ordinary author could rival. It could offer a detailed pattern for worship and day-to-day conduct alike, thus carrying out a variety of functions that no epic, tragedy, or historical inscription could fulfill. Forgeries of this kind abounded, and the methods used to detect them grew in sophistication as the complexity of the forgeries became ever more baroque.
One classic artifact of forgery in this new key is the Letter of Aristeas, a long prose work probably composed in the second century B.C. It purports to explain the origin of the Greek Old Testament or Septuagint. Demetrius of Phalerum, the librarian of Ptolemy Philadelphus, ruler of Egypt early in the third century B.C., writes a memorandum to his king about acquisitions policy. He points out that the library lacks the "Books of the Laws of the Jews" and that the Hebrew texts of these, the only ones available, are inaccurate because they have never received "royal attention" — that is, because they are carelessly made personal copies, not the critically prepared and edited official copies of the Alexandrian library. Demetrius receives permission to ask the high priest Eleazar to send six representatives from each of the twelve tribes to prepare a perfect, official translation. The work proceeds to defend the philosophical profundity of the elaborate Jewish ritual code and to offer instructions for good princely conduct. It concludes with the acceptance of the new translation by the Jews of Alexandria.
Aristeas' letter is certainly a forgery; it begins with a gross error, the identification of Demetrius of Phalerum as Alexandrian librarian (a post he never held) under Ptolemy Philadelphus (who disliked him), and contains many other errors as well. But it shows a self-consciousness and maturity of technique not encountered in previous literary fakes. The author, in the first place, uses the methods that the Alexandrian critics had developed to correct texts and detect fakes in order to make his own fake seem credible. He uses the method of allegorical exegesis — which Pergamene scholars had used to deal with what seemed to them tasteless and primitive parts of Homer, and which he perhaps encountered in the work of Alexandrian sympathizers with this method, like Apollodorus — to explain away the apparently tasteless and primitive dietary rules of Jewish tradition. He even uses the terms of textual criticism — the art of establishing correct texts by collation of manuscripts and emendation, devised by the Alexandrian scholars — to suggest the superior accuracy of the Septuagint and to undergird the credibility of his narrative. And he bolsters the authority of his account by using other techniques that show a considerable knowledge of scholarly standards. Instead of telling the story of Demetrius' and Ptolemy's negotiations in his own words, he quotes Demetrius' memorandum verbatim, using the apparently genuine archival document to adorn what might otherwise seem a bare and unconvincing narrative.
The author's sophistication also emerges from the literary form of his book. He writes for two audiences at once. On the one hand, he tries to show his fellow Jews that the Greek Bible used in Alexandria is superior to the Hebrew Bible of Palestine; on the other, he tries to show his non-Jewish readers that the Jewish ritual law is not a mind-bogglingly trivial and complex set of meaningless commands but an allegorical code for philosophical statements about the need for believers to pursue righteousness at all times. The work was written not for personal gain but for spiritual authority; it sought this by enfolding forgery within forgery, lie within lie, like Russian dolls in order of size. No Parthenopaeus could rival Aristeas' letter in complexity of design or coherence of execution.
Aristeas' forgery is perhaps the most complex spurious authority to survive, but it is only one member of a populous set. The early Christians produced them by the dozen; both the pastoral epistles to Timothy and Titus in the New Testament and numerous documents outside it, such as the Apostolic Constitutions, tried to settle disputes about doctrines and practices by invoking the authority of the earliest and truest Christians, speaking in the first person. The fact that Near Eastern religious teachings were originally couched in difficult languages — and the associated fact that Greeks, those Americans of the ancient world, dealt with the existence of foreigners and foreign tongues by speaking Greek louder when abroad — made it particularly easy for non-Greeks in search of authority to enhance the value of their wares. They claimed that what seemed trivial or obscure in Greek was merely an inadequate translation from an original couched in an inaccessible holy language. Thus the author of the revelations of the Egyptian demigod Hermes Trismegistus — a member of a small patriotic sect, writing in Greek for Greek readers — explained that "when the Greeks would translate" his hieroglyphic revelations in the future, they would lose their original force and resemble ordinary, insipid Greek philosophy. He thus supported his pretense to be writing a genuinely "Egyptian" text, making a patchwork of Greek philosophical tags and poorly-understood Egyptian traditions seem both older and more alien. Philo of Byblos did much the same for his own partially genuine and partially faked Phoenician histories.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Foreword ix
Acknowledgments xix
Introduction 3
1 Forgery and Criticism: An Overview 8
2 Forgers: Types and Tools 36
3 Critics: Tradition and Innovation 69
4 Forgery into Criticism: Techniques of Metamorphosis, Metamorphosis of Techniques 99
Epilogue 124
Afterword 129
Notes 141
A Note on Further Reading 163
Index 167
What People are Saying About This
“Grafton makes clear that the master forger must also be . . . a scholar . . . as knowledgeable as those whom he is trying to fool. . . . This elegant monograph ranges from Porphyry through Isaac Casaubon . . . on to Scaliger, Chatterton and others, though its focus remains the transmission of classical texts. Or, rather, pseudo-classical texts.”—Washington Post“Forgery is the pornography of erudition; and—combining scandal, deception, and betrayal with tales of virtuoso detective work—it has long exercised romantic attraction for historians, providing illicit pleasures (when it has not provoked scholarly outrage). To this fascinating and controversial aspect of the history of scholarship Grafton’s book is a learned, insightful, and most entertaining introduction.”—Donald R. Kelley, Renaissance Quarterly“A good read. . . . Grafton’s principal theme is the symbiotic relationship between forgers and critics, and the spur provided by the efforts of each to the development of new skills and techniques by the other. . . . Grafton’s notes, as always, are superb . . . providing lesser mortals with plenty of new and essential material for study.”—Julia Haig Gaisser, Bryn Mawr Classical Reviews