Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (20 page)

Chief among the reasons for thinking that ancients were interested in knowing who actually wrote a literary work is what we have already begun to see repeatedly: ancient critics themselves addressing the issue with striking frequency. Speyer cogently speaks of an “extensive body of [ancient] writings, which does not serve any other purpose but to separate out inauthentic works from the literary remains of famous authors by means of philological and historical methods.”
³⁶
The ancient evidence is overwhelming. Just to give a fuller sense of the matter, I might mention some isolated instances.

Herodotus provides the first documented instances of Echtheitskritik, already in the fifth century
BCE,
when, among other things, he questions whether Homer authored the Cypria and the Epigoni epic (2, 116ff. and 4, 32). Ion of Chios, in his
Triagmi
, indicates that Pythagoras ascribed some of his own poems to Orpheus
³⁷
; so too, Aristotle doubted that the Orphic poems were by Orpheus.
³⁸
Extensive comments on authenticity—determining which works were
and which were
—appear in the Neoplatonic commentaries on Aristotle, from Ammonius and Simplicius to Elias and David.
³⁹

After the construction of the great libraries of Alexandria and Pergamum, Echtheitskritik became the task of the grammarians. Thus we learn, for example, from Quintilian:

For not only is the art of writing combined with that of speaking, but correct reading also precedes illustration, and with all these is joined the exercise of judgment, which the old grammarians, indeed, used with such severity that they not only allowed themselves to distinguish certain verses with a particular mark of censure and to remove, as spurious, certain books which had been inscribed with false titles, from their sets, but even brought some authors within their canon and excluded others altogether from classification.
⁴⁰

And so, in the first half of the third century, Callimachus at the Alexandrian Museion categorized books in the library as genuine
, inauthentic (i.e., forged:
), or debated
.
⁴¹

More specifically, in the later first century
BCE
, Dionysius of Halicarnassus expressed doubts (“Lysias” ch. 12 and “Dinarchus”
chs. 2
–
3
) about speeches of Lysias that were widely thought genuine, as we will see more fully later. Aulus Gellius indicates that Lucius Aelius maintained that only 25 of the 130 comedies circulating in the name of Plautus were authentic (
Noct. Attic
. 3.3.11–14). So too, numerous forgeries were in circulation in the name of Democritus: “Many fictions of this kind seem to have been attached to the name of Democritus by ignorant men, who sheltered themselves under his reputation and authority (nobilitatis auctoritatisque eius perfugio utentibus)” (10. 12.8).
⁴²
Plutarch repeatedly speaks of his doubts concerning the genuineness of letters (
Brutus
53, 7;
Lysand
. 14, 4). So too Pausanias on occasion, as when he expresses some mild doubt over the Hesiodic authorship of the
Theogony
(e.g., 9.27.2: “Hesiod, or the one who wrote the
Theogony
fathered on Hesiod”). Arguably the most famous critic of all was Galen, who took on the entire Hippocratic corpus, in part precisely to decide what was authentic and what not.
⁴³
And we have already considered Diogenes Laertius and comments from the second book of his ten-volume work. Isolated other comments include his statement that the
Nautical Astronomy
attributed to Thales
is said by others to be the work of Phocus of Samos (
Lives
, 1.23); that among the writings of Glaucon some thirty-two are to be considered spurious (
2.124); that the lecture notes of Strato “are doubted” (5.60); that some attribute Phlegon’s play
Philosophers
to Poseidippus (7.27); and that a verse of Empedocles is perhaps to be assigned instead to Simonides (8.65). And on and on.

This listing of Greek and Roman sources intent on uncovering forgeries is not meant to be exhaustive. It is merely intended to illustrate a historical reality: ancient authors who mention pseudepigrapha do so because they are invested in knowing who really wrote the books produced in the name of known figures. Intellectuals were widely concerned to know whether a book’s reputed author was its real author.

As we have already seen in part, there was an extensive discourse about authenticity in the early church as well, all of it implying a concern over what we might call literary property. To the discussions already cited, I might mention an expression of dismay over “heretical” forgeries from Ambrosiaster, who laments that just as the Devil sometimes assumes the guise of the redeemer in order to deceive believers, so too heretics write in the names of the sacred authors.
⁴⁴
Ambrosiaster does not say here what he might think about forgers of his own theological persuasion; but there is no doubt what he thought of forgers with whom he disagreed. This naturally raises the broader question of the attitudes that ancient critics, especially Christians, had about the phenomenon of forgery.

If there were no concept of intellectual property in antiquity, it would be virtually impossible to explain not only why plagiarists were condemned and sometimes punished, but also why authors complained about forgeries being produced in their own names. With his customary humor and bite, for example, Martial objects to forgers who produced poems, claiming to be him:

My page has not wounded even those it justly hates, and fame won with another’s blush is not dear to me! What does this avail me when certain folk would pass off as mine darts wet with the blood of Lycambes, and under my name a man vomits his viperous venom who owns he cannot bear the light of day? (
Epigrams
, 7.12)

If some malignant fellow claim as mine poems that are steeped in black venom, do you lend me a patron’s voice, and with all your strength and without stopping shout: “My Martial did not write that”? (7.72)
⁴⁵

The best-known instance of complaint comes from Galen, a century later. In one of his many autobiographical accounts, he indicates that when passing by a bookseller in the Sandalarium he overheard an argument between a man who had just purchased a book with the title “Galen the Physician” and a trained amateur scholar, who read two lines and proclaimed “This is not Galen’s language—the title is false.”
⁴⁶
Galen’s own reaction was to write
De libris propriis
, the book about his books. Here he was straightforward about his goals: to allow those without the requisite grammatical and rhetoric training to know which books were actually his. And he certainly had a lot to be concerned about. By one modern account, some 13 percent of the surviving Galenic texts are forgeries.
⁴⁷

Among other things, these instances from Martial and Galen immediately give the lie to those New Testament scholars who claim that forgeries in the name of Paul, or Peter, or any other apostle, necessarily come from after their lifetimes, since no one would have dared forge a writing in the name of a person still living. Interestingly, this claim is often made by more conservative biblical scholars, who, ironically enough, tend to hold to the authenticity of 2 Thessalonians, a book in which “Paul” objects to a forgery circulating in his own name among the Thessalonians (2:2).