Roberta Berardi - Defining Authorship, Debating Authenticity: Problems of Authority from Classical Antiquity to the Renaissance

Beitrge zur Altertumskunde

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ISBN 9783110684551

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En attendant, tudions les choses qui ne sont plus. Il est ncessaire de les connatre, ne ftce que pour les viter. Les contrefaons du pass prennent de faux noms et sappellent volontiers l'avenir.

(Victor Hugo, Les Misrables)

The present volume further examines the themes studied in BzA 375, On the Track of the Books, as part of a project of coordinated conferences organized by the Cultural Association Prolepsis. Book circulation, one of the main topics of On the Track of the Books and the colloquium from which it originated, has often been the only way in which certain books have survived, where these were lost in their original place of production, and later rediscovered elsewhere far away, even wherever book trade took them. The second Prolepsis International Conference, Auctor est Aequivocum: Authenticity, Authority, and Authorship from the Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages (Bari, October 2627, 2017), has delved further into the subject and, among other topics, focussed on texts which have survived to our day only because of their erroneous, but in the end fortunate, misattribution to a more important author. Authorship and authenticity have indeed played crucial roles in the survival and persistence of literary and historical works that would otherwise have been regarded only as works of minor significance. The survival and circulation of books, and the dynamics governing these processes, hence form a fil rouge uniting the present collection with BzA 375, On the Track of the Books.

The title of the conference from which this volume derives is a quotation by Honorius of Autun, a 12thcentury Christian theologian, who declares in his Expositio in Cantica Canticorum (prol., PL 172, 348) that Auctor est aequivocum, thereby underlining the ambiguity of the term auctor. This quotation presents a useful starting point for discussion of the vast number of issues arising from the concepts of authority, authorship, and authenticity, and of the problems that relate to their often controversial definitions. The contributions in the present volume address a number of these themes through studies focussed on who attributed these words to the Christian philosopher, and made them memorable, by conferring on them the remarkable authority of Augustine. Was this a fraud, a forgery, or a trick of the memory or ego?

Questce quun auteur? was Michel Foucaults question in an article of 1969,

or the problem of textual and editorial variants: these are all issues which have been, however, already treated at length in the past by authorities on these specific issues. This is why this book is conscious to place itself within a long, but continuously lively, tradition of studies on the subject.

A few crucial titles have been key within this tradition. Landmark studies are constituted by the works of W. Speyer and N. Brox on pseudepigraphical literature. have dealt with the theme of fakes and forgeries, acknowledging the changed attitude towards this type of literature: scholarly focus has shifted from concern with problems of textual authenticity, and hence with isolating fakes and condemning forgers, to an interest in the cultural historical contexts and dynamics of textual production from which they emerged.

It is in light of this contemporary concern around literary authenticity, and the long tradition of studying it, that this volume hopes to make further contributions to the wideranging debates on ancient authenticity and authorship.

The book is divided into three sections: Attribution, Authorship, and Authenticity. The chapters within each section broadly follow the chronological order of their subjectmatter, although the complexity of pseudepigraphical literature, of course, prevents clearcut chronological specificity, and many chapters necessarily deal with material stretching over several centuries. Anonymous texts, moreover, often elude sound dating. For these same reasons, the three sections have been structured primarily on thematic lines, even if this has inevitably resulted in overlapping content.

The first section, Attribution, deals with the process of ascribing a particular work to a particular author, and the reasons for doing so, from ancient to modern times: debates about ascription can be detected already in antiquity, sometimes begin to emerge only later, and in some cases continues to puzzle scholars to this day.

Semonides or Simonides? The centurylong controversy over the attribution of a Greek elegiac fragment is Elisa Nuria Merisios (La Sapienza University of Rome) starting point for deeper reflection on authorship and the attribution of authorship in Archaic Greek fragmentary lyric poetry.

The paper by Linda Rocchi (University of Edinburgh) deals with the intriguing case of P. Oxy. 31.2537 (2nd/3rd century AD), a papyrus codex containing 22 Lysianic . In her paper, she argues that this papyrus might have been a sort of annotated catalogue of all available Lysianic speeches regardless of their authenticity and may therefore be regarded as a snapshot of the Lysianic corpus as it was known to X orat. 836a and Phot. Bibl. 262, 488b; namely, at the beginning of its formation.

Davide Massimos (University of Oxford) paper investigates the viability of applying the label pseudoPlato to a series of epigrams variously ascribed to the philosopher Plato in ancient times, and which are now generally believed to be spurious. Focusing on the subgroup of erotic epigrams, the paper analyzes the various factors which influenced how the corpus has been slowly shaped over the centuries, and the misunderstandings, erroneous readings, and possible forgeries that have led to the ascription of these epigrams to Plato.

The aim of Pietro Zaccarias (KU Leuven) paper is to determine the criteria used by ancient textual critics, as outlined in the lost work of Demetrius of Magnesia a 1stcentury BC scholar, who authored a pinacographical and biographical work entitled On Poets and Writers with the Same Name for distinguishing homonymous writers and detecting spurious works, as well as his method of detecting pseudepigraphical works.

Latin metrical inscriptions, their authors as well as the literary works quoted in them form the core of Anna Dorotea Teofilos (Independent Researcher) paper. She closely analyses the epitaph of an anonymous merchant found in Brundisium, Apulia [CIL IX 60 = CLE 1533] and outlines a profile of its remarkably skilled and competent albeit anonymous author.

Rosa Lorito (Independent Researcher) shows in her paper the importance of identifying composers of epigraphic texts especially when these relate to the government of the Roman Empire. She does so by thoroughly examining the socalled Volcei landregister [