Forgeries, From Antiquity to the Present

Constantine the Great and Sylvester I, Pope from 314 to 335, were not close friends. They did not, despite Dan Brown's repeated insistence to the contrary, re-write the Bible together at the Council of Nicea. In fact, Sylvester was not AT Nicea. These and other basic facts of history, which were never well-hidden, caused many people, when a document surfaced in the 8th century, purporting to be a letter from Constantine to Sylvester granting him and his Papal successors spiritual and temporal sovereignty over the Western Roman Empire, to see it for the cheesy forgery it was. Nevertheless, this purported letter, known as the Donation of Constantine, was used from time to time by Popes and their allies as an argument in various power struggles, and has occasionally fooled people down to the present day, including, of course, Dan Brown. 

Although many people knew from the start that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery, it was Lorenzo Vallo who proved it in 1440, by demonstrating that its Latin was that of the 8th century. This was a great milestone in textual criticism.

 

In the 17th century some scholars, notably Spinoza with his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, began to take a similarly critical view of the Bible and the Classics, investigating their authorship and time of composition. Spinoza was expelled from the Jewish Community of Amsterdam for suggesting that Moses might not have authored all of the Pentateuch. 

More recently, scholars have determined that of the 13 books of the New Testament traditionally attributed, 6 were written by someone else: Colossians, Ephesians, 2nd Thessalonians, 1st and 2nd Timothy and Titus.

Less famous than such investigations into the Bible, but at least as interesting to some readers, are those examining traditional attributions of ancient "pagan" texts. Platonic dialogues certainly or almost certainly not written by Plato include Second Alcibiades, Hipparchus, Minos, The Rival Lovers, Theages, Clitophon, About Justice, About Virtue, Demodocus, Sisyphus, Eryxias and Axiochus. Homer, Vergil, Caesar, Sallust and Ovid are just a few of the ancients whose oeuvres have been whittled down in the estimate of textual critics.

The Historia Augusta are somewhat the other way around: until rather recently they were regarded as a collaboration between six historians, a collection of the biographies of the Emperors and those around them from AD 117 to 284. They tended to be regarded as very poor history. Gibbon and Burckhardt, noticing many of the errors, angrily condemned the shoddy work of the authors, which made their own work much more difficult,

Then in the late 19th and early 20 centuries Harmann Dessau asserted that they are in fact the work of one author, a position which has steadily gained support. This of course raised questions such as: why would an author do this? and, What sort of work is the Historia Augusta? Ronald Syme took up Dessau's work, and in 1968 published a volume entitled Ammianus and the Historia Augusta, which suggests that the work is a parody of historical writing, for which modern readers still need to develop the necessary sense of humor. It seems possible that the author had never intended to deceive anyone into thinking that his work was to be understood as history. This case is very interesting, and most definitely still open. 

It's not always texts per se which are under investigation by textual critics. Take the curious case of the Vinland Map, first published in 1965 together with the Tartar Relation, a 13th century text describing a Franciscan mission to the court of then Mongols. This copy of the Tartar Relation seemed to present no great mystery. There was no doubt that this was a genuine 15th-century manuscript on parchment. But then there was the Vinland Map, bound in the same volume, also on 15th-century parchment, and presenting a view of the route from Scandinavia to Canada. This was a map purporting to show the route of Viking voyages to the Western hemisphere, a map supposedly made in the MID-15th century, a few decades before Columbus. 

The parchment really was from the 15th century, but this proved nothing about the map. Blank pieces of 15th-century parchment can be had, and can be used to produce various faked things.

Well, if this was a forgery, it was at the very least an above-average forgery, keeping experts busy assessing it for decades. Samuel Eliot Morison immediately declared it a fake, because it included a very accurate representation of the west coast of Greenland. Morison pointed out that the west coast of Greenland had not been navigated before the 17th century, and that until then Greenland had been considered to be part of a continent, not an island. 

As soon as I read that, years ago, I assumed that Morison had solved this puzzle, and wondered what was taking the others so ling to catch up. Then, literally just a few days ago, it occurred to me that someone, after Greenland had been navigated, could have altered a genuine 15th-century map to include the west coast of Greenland, not realizing that this would make the map seem obviously fake and not more impressive.

So for a few days I was once more very excited about the Vinland Map -- until today, when I read that, along about 2018, chemical analysis of the ink had finally convinced everyone that the map was a forgery.

Still, having taken more than 60 years before the public to be conclusively exposed, that is definitely an above-average fake. 

Although some will find it to be off-topic, I cannot end this essay without a salute to journalistic fact-checkers and their battle against the tide of lies. Because I do not find it to be off-topic.

Historia Augusta, Eusebius, Gibbon, Burckhardt

The Historia Augusta, written in Latin, claim to be a collection of biographies of Roman Emperors written by 6 authors in the 3rd century AD. Many or most historians of ancient Rome now consider them to be the work of one author in the late 4th century, which perhaps was not meant to be read as history at all, but belongs to some other genre -- perhaps historical fiction, perhaps parody of historical writing. In the opinion of most specialists, the identity of the author of the Historia Augusta remains unknown. A notable exception is the French historian Stéphane Ratti, who says that he has established that the Historia Augusta was written by the elder Nicomachus Flavianus, friend of the illustrious Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, statesman and courageous, albeit unsuccessful defender of the traditional Roman religions against the encroachment of Christianity. If there is a substantial school of thought which follows Ratti in this, it has thus far escaped my (amateur) attention.

The Historia Ecclesiastica is a history of Christianity written in Greek by Eusebius, Bishop of Caesaria, who lived from ca AD 265 to 339 or 340. Which means that the subjects of these first two paragraphs are in the wrong chronological order. They're in the order they were thought for many many centuries to follow.

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was written in English by Edward Gibbon and published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788. It covers the period from the late 1st century AD until after the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453, with some remarks referring to the period right down to Gibbon's own life.

Die Zeit Konstantin des Grossen (The Time of Constantine the Great) was written in German by Jacob Burckhardt, published in 1853 and revised several times over the next several decades.

Both Gibbon and Burckhardt repeatedly complain about the unreliability of both the Historia Augusta (neither suspecting that it might not actually be historical writing at all) and Eusebius. And both judge Eusebius more harshly. Burckhardt, who usually in his many works of history, art history and culutural criticism writes in a conventionally composed scholarly style, completely loses his composure when referring to Eusebius, not only calling him completely dishonest, the first thoroughly dishonest historian of the ancient world (and Burckhardt was under the impression that the Historia Augusta were written before Eusebius' lifetime), but also becoming quite personal and repeatedly calling him disgusting, the most disgusting liar imaginable, and so forth.

Gibbon was among the earliest European authors who took very little trouble to conceal that they were atheists; Burckhardt rudely abused a highly revered historian of early Christianity. From their own times to the present, without interruption, Christian historians have accused Gibbon and Burckhardt of anti-Christian bias, of having less faith in Christian sources because they were Christian, and more faith in non-Christian sources because they were non-Christian. In their turn, these Christian historians have been accused of being biased in exactly the opposite direction. It has not always been Christians who have attacked Gibbon and Burckhardt and non-Christians who've defended them.

For my part, I find it impossible to imagine an historian who is 100% free of bias. The best we can hope for in reading historical accounts is that the historian we're reading might be less biased than some others.

I find that Gibbon and Burckhardt were at the absolute cutting edges of their times when it came to historical accuracy and insight, to separating the valuable information from the nonsense in the texts they read, out of which they made their own texts. I find that there is still much of value in their work. You may or may not find me quite silly for thinking so.

But, of course, the work of historians constantly continues. We build upon the work of those historians whom we consider to be the best, and we improve their work in the light of new information. This can sometimes be painful to admit, if one has developed a personal fondness for an historian of a previous time. But to expect Gibbon to out-do the historians of the 21st century in all things would be somewhat like believing that a watch made during Gibbon's lifetime

could outperform a quality 21-st century watch

in every way. It would be cuckoo-bananas. Aside from the entire thicket of Eusebius' honesty and Burckhardt's opinion of Eusebius and Burckhardt's objectivity and the objectivity of someone impuning Burckhardt's objectivity, and countless other questions from which it would be somewhere between very difficult and impossible to remove the last trace of prejudice, there are objective advances. Things are discovered, artifacts and texts. The historical picture is revised in the light of new information.

Or it is figured out, by no means with total certainty yet, but approaching it steadily, that what was thought to be a collection of historical writings is... not. That it may be a parody of historical writing. Or perhaps a glimpse into a non-Christian culture which persisted, but went into hiding as the Christians took over the Empire. Or perhaps something else. You see how in this case historians and Classicists, by arriving at an unexpected answer, have multiplied rather than reduced the number of open questions.

Ronald Syme Redux

Seven years ago, I published on this blog a post in which I declared, among other things, that I found the prose of Ronald Syme to be unreadable.

In that post, I jokingly speculated whether there had been something wrong with Syme's medulla oblongata, and mocked his prose style thusly:

"Syme irritates me with the over-use of periods. Which unnecessarily breaks up medium- to long-sized sentences. Into smaller ones. Which in turn leads to the above-mentioned conjecture. About the poor man's lower brain stem. A medical speculation not necessarily to be taken seriously. And not the only stylistic affection of Syme's which annoys me. But to find the others, I'd have to read more Syme. Which I really don't want to do. So suffice it for now to say that the turnip would use twelve periods after the last semicolon above. By the time I would use one. If I were not mocking him."

Ronald Syme, for those of you still wondering, lived from 1903 to 1989 and was among the the 20th century's most prominent Classical scholars and historians of ancient Rome. In fact, in the years since writing the above-mentioned dismissal of him on the grounds of unreadability, I kept coming across his name in the work and footnotes of other scholars, so often and with such positive remarks that I finally decided, quite recently, that I had to try again to read his work, that I had no choice, that surely the problem was with me and not with the way Syme wrote.

Whatever my problem was, it's now gone, to my amazement. I now find that my above-quoted satire of his prose is quite unfair, because far from all of his sentences are extremely short, and those which are I now find to be justifiably so. I now find Syme's prose quite good, witty, extremely erudite, polished, elegant -- in short, suddenly, my opinion of his writing now much more closely resembles the opinion of the rest of the world, and my earlier distaste is now mysterious to me, as it surely must have been to anyone else who'd noticed it.

I had two of Syme's books laying around, The Roman Revolution, first published in 1939, and Ammianus and the Historia Augusta, first published in 1968. I devoured the former with great delight and am now struggling, with just as much delight, with the subtleties and many, many footnotes of the latter. I had already begun to, as Edward Gibbon put it, "dive into the ocean" of the Historia Augusta. Now, unlike Gibbon, I have the very best guide to the flora and fauna of that ocean.

As has the rest of the world, for the past half-century. I apologize to the rest of the world, and to Syme's memory, for taking so long to catch up.

In case you're wondering what the Historia Augusta are: they are a collection of biographies of 2nd- and 3rd- century Roman Emperors, purported compiled by six authors writing in the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine. Or, as the world has gradually been figuring out since Hermann Dessau had a major breakthrough in the late 19th century, they are a parody of biographies of 2nd- and 3rd- century Roman Emperors, written by one jokester in the late 4th century or later. Back when they were considered to be historical writing, the more perceptive of later historians, such as Gibbon, were constantly cursing them for the many errors they contained. Now, when they're seen as historical fiction with a satirical bent, as many papers and volumes and conferences are devoted to them, as speculation rages about who actually wrote them and when, we're able to see more and more delicious jokes in them. They are, as Syme says, a "garden of delights."