Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (11 page)

Costa usefully divides the fictional letters into two types. The first are “imaginary” (sometimes called “comic”) letters. These are written under fictitious pen
names, such as Aelian, Alciphron, and Philostratus, and appear to be produced by professional rhetoricians, or rhetoricians in training, on topics and themes to which they might devote declamations. They “aim to portray character and various levels of society, or to evoke a past age.”
²⁹
The other type comprises letters that are attributed to famous historical figures such as Phalaris or Themistocles, and especially to philosophers such as Anacharsis, Hippocrates, Diogenes, and Socrates. An earlier example would be Ovid’s famous
Heroides
, which was clearly meant to be a fiction built on historically fictional characters. In this latter type, the figure in question is made to speak “in character,” that is, these are written exercises in ethopoeia. Most of the philosophical letters have a didactic, moralizing aim, but they are also meant to reflect something of the character and personality of the supposed author.
³⁰

The thorough and enlightening discussion of Rosenmeyer shows, perhaps unwittingly, just how difficult it can be at times to differentiate between literary fictions and deceptions. She notes that R. Syme in particular has argued that these letters should not be termed forgeries, but are better understood as “impostures” (a term that does not seem hugely different in connotation), which “were doubtless created without any serious intent to deceive.”
³¹
Rosenmeyer’s principal concern is that these writings not be simply written off as of no importance—as they have been since Bentley’s exposure of the letters of Phalaris—and so discarded as the chaff of history. They are important in their own right, when situated in their appropriate historical, cultural, and especially rhetorical contexts.

This is fair enough, but there are some questionable cases. Rosenmeyer herself points out that verisimilitudes were part of the exercise, as these letters speak about the mechanics of writing, sending, sealing, receiving, and so on, for one major reason: “The more realistic the epistolary moment appears, both in terms of the occasion and the specific letter, the more convincing it will be to its readers, who seek the literary thrill of reading someone else’s private messages.”
³²
This sounds like a concession to the idea that the writers wanted to convince their readers, and it is difficult to draw a very clear line between that attempt and pure literary deception.

One might consider, for example, the two sets of Socratic epistles, one connected with Antisthenes, which urges a rigorous lifestyle, and the other with Aristippus, which supports hedonism. Both advocate their own perspective and inveigh against the other. And why is that? It is because, in Rosenmeyer’s own words, “a treatise on the subject would be rejected as just another (mis)
interpretation of the philosopher; but a letter in the voice of the great man himself, or in that of his most highly regarded disciple, would be hard to refute.”
³³
That is exactly right; but it is also the reason that some of these fictions may be seen as going a step further in wanting their readers really to believe them to be actual letters written by the philosopher himself. It is at least possible, that is, that some of these works were produced not simply as rhetorical exercises but in order to perpetrate a literary deceit. However one judges that issue, fictions of this kind were difficult to keep in check. As Martina Janssen observes, there was no way to control their reception history, as later readers in another context may have taken an authorial fiction to be a bona fide authorial claim, so that an original rhetorical exercise came to function as a forgery, apart from any authorial intent.
³⁴

In any event, with only one or two possible exceptions—possibly the letters of Paul and Seneca?
³⁵
—there are probably no literary fictions among the early Christian writings, produced simply as rhetorical exercises.

Pen names—or pseudonymity in the traditional, German, sense—were not common in antiquity, but were not unheard of either. This use of a pen name differs from a literary fiction of the first type described above in that the composition in question is not a rhetorical exercise in ethopoeia, but an actual writing with a purpose that extends beyond itself.

In some instances a pen name may have been relatively innocent, the opportunity to write a work anonymously under a name chosen at random. This appears to be the case with the work produced by the six purported authors of the Historia Augusta. Ronald Syme in particular has shown that the solitary author of this collection of imperial biographies was a learned but somewhat mischievous scholar from around 400 CE, who fabricated a good deal of information, much of it for his personal enjoyment.
³⁶
He was remarkably successful in his endeavor to hide his identity: up to the end of the nineteenth century the work was held to be authentic and basically reliable. Though not everyone realized it at the time,
the death knell was struck in 1899 by Herman Dessau in a paper showing that the entire composition was the work of a single author writing centuries after the alleged authors. Dessau’s argument: some of the characters mentioned in the work are fictitious and show signs of having been invented near the end of the fourth century.

In his chapter on “The Bogus Names,” Syme categorizes all the cited names and authorities of the Historia Augusta, in ten categories, including the most significant: “fictitious characters who by their names reflect families eminent in the Roman aristocracy in the second half of the fourth century.” He concludes that the author of the work was extremely erudite, but that he included a “profusion of details about food and drink and sex” which “were not meant to be taken seriously.” Moreover, “he has his own silly or elaborate jokes.” Syme’s conclusion was that “this man is a kind of rogue scholar.”
³⁷

In other cases we know full well the author of a book, but it is hard to discern a reason for the pen name. Thus Iamblichus wrote
On the Mysteries
as Abamon, but his reason is itself a mystery. T. Hopfner suggested that Iamblichus wanted to hide from his potentially Christian readers the fact that he and his fellow Neoplatonists were sometimes at odds with one another. The book, after all, is a response to Porphyry’s attack on his former student for his attraction to the occult, in a letter ostensibly addressed to “Anebo,” itself a name that has generated considerable discussion (is it too an invention?).
³⁸
Hopfner’s theory, however, seems rather unlikely, as Clarke, Dillon, and Hershbell point out, given Iamblichus’ virtually complete disregard for Christians otherwise.
³⁹
It may simply be that he recognized Porphyry’s attack leveled at an alias for himself, and he responded in kind, pretending that the fictitious Anebo was his (the fictitious Abamon’s) student as a “poke in the eye” to Porphyry, his own teacher.
⁴⁰

There are other instances where a pen name may have been chosen simply to protect the identity of the real author, in cases in which safety or other personal concerns were an issue: Janssen instances Nestorius’ use of the name Heraclides in his
Liber Heraclidis
.
⁴¹
At other times the use of a pen name was not innocent at all. That is Plutarch’s suspicion of Xenophon, when he wrote his
Anabasis
in the name of Themistogenes, an alleged general of Syracuse. This pseudonym is often taken to be a simple pen name, chosen for no particular reason. But as Plutarch points out (
Moralia
345e), by discussing his own military activities in the third person, as a purported outsider, Xenophon was able to give himself greater credence and glory than if he had written the account in his own name.

In yet other instances modern scholars have erred in thinking that a work was produced under a pen name. Aristophanes is sometimes said to have written his early plays pseudonymously, but D. McDowell has argued that in fact, given the mechanics of theatrical production, Aristophanes published them under the names of the persons who directed them, as those who were ultimately responsible for their contents.
⁴²

Ancient critics recognized full well the problems posed by homonymity, in a world where many names were common and few means were available to distinguish between authors of the same name. No one took the problem more seriously than the first-century
BCE
Demetrius of Magnesia, who wrote his book
not only to differentiate among homonymous writers, but also to tell anecdotes about them.
⁴³
Diogenes Laertius, our principle source for the book, more commonly refers to it with the shortened title
(e.g., 1.38.79; 7.31.169). It is cited by other authors as well, however, including Athenaeus (
Banqueters
13.611B). An entire chapter is preserved by Dionysius of Halicarnassus.

Diogenes himself often deals with the problems of authorship posed by homonymity, reporting, for example, as just one instance, that the critics Panaetius and Sosicrates maintained that of all the writings commonly attributed to Ariston of Chios, the Stoic philosopher, only the letters were authentically his. Another thirteen titles, some in multiple volumes, went under his name, but were in fact written by Ariston the Peripatetic (
Lives
7.163). With respect to the figure with whom we started, Heraclides of Pontus, Diogenes informs us that there were thirteen other literary figures who shared the name, one of them, confusingly enough, also known as Ponticus.

As one might expect, there are times when ancient critics have difficulty resolving issues of homonymity. And so, Quintilian wavers on the rhetorical writings assigned to Hermagoras:

There are however books ascribed to Hermagoras which support the view under discussion; but either the attribution is wrong or the author was some other Hermagoras. For how can they possibly be by the Hermagoras who wrote so much so admirably about Rhetoric, since (as is clear also from the first book of Cicero’s
Rhetoric
) he divided the subject matter of Rhetoric into Theses and Causes? (
Institutio Oratio
3.5.14)
⁴⁴

At other times there was less confusion, as in a case reported by Suetonius:

For while some tell us that this same Ennius published a book “On Letters and Syllables” and another “On Metres,” Lucius Cotta is right in maintaining that these were not the work of the poet but of a later Ennius, who is also the author of the volumes “On the Science of Augury.” (
On Grammarians
1.3)
⁴⁵

Numerous cases of homonymity have been uncovered only in modern times.
⁴⁶

What matters particularly for my purposes here, however, is the fact that some ancient critics posited homonymity as a chief reason that writings were transmitted under a false or wrong name, and were therefore to be termed
. This is explicitly stated by the fifth-century Neoplatonist Olympiodorus, when he wants to explore
the claim is repeated some years later by his student Elias.
⁴⁷