On some spurious monuments of ancient historical writing (counterfeits in the corpus of the fragments of early Greek historians)

Abstract

Some historical works, which were considered very ancient in antiquity, were forged in some later time, as it was ascertained. One of the best-known examples is the treatise The foundation of Miletus and the whole Ionia, which was ascribed to Cadmus of Miletus but really written in the Late Classical period, and even not in Miletus. Cephalon of Gergithes was cited as a “very ancient” historian; as a matter of fact, he was invented by Hegesianax, a writer of the 3rd–2nd centuries B.C.). Such a counterfeit as Amelesagoras’ Atthis deceived even Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a subtle expert, who unhesitatingly included its author into his list of the earliest historians, although that Atthis is a product of the Late Classical time. The articles cites and analyzes some extant fragments of these counterfeits (they deal mostly with various mythological subjects), and also raises the question: for what purpose such “armchair” and book-learning studies, which were popular from the Late Classical period and became especially widespread during the Hellenistic one, were provided with fictitious authors who allegedly lived much earlier? One may suppose that the aim was securing an “authority of the old times”.