Martínez Javier (ed.) Fakes and Forgers of Classical Literature

Brill, 2014. — 319 p. — (Studies in the Reception of Classical Antiquity 2). — ISBN 978-90-04-26641-4.This new volume of papers takes its place in an ongoing series dedicated to the topic of fakedom in textuality. In particular, the allusive title is a twin for editor Martínez’ 2012 collection, Mundus vult decipi. Completing the apocryphal and complicatedly fake- and mock-ascribed Petronian saying (see Chapter 1) will prove to be a reliably authentic guide to thoroughgoing congruence between the opening salvo and the present ­follow-up for 2013. The changes in focus signalled by the divergent sub-titles “Studies on Fakes and Forgeries of Classical Literature” after “Estudios interdisciplinares sobre falsificación textual y literaria” are more apparent than substantive. The element of interdisciplinarity is indeed less pronounced in the second gathering, but the same thrust is there still in that the praxis of classical studies as a deliberately totalizing, compre-
hensive conglomeration of inter-related investigations must always negotiate the porosity of borderlines with whatever specialisms involved in the evolution of First World into global culture. “Authors’ pseudonyms in the seventeenth century” (see Chapter 16) challenges criteria for belonging
(but writing the grammar of classical languages is first step to Parnassus); so also, from another angle, with the lexico-graphical wordpower, “Forging Ancient Greek Words in Modern Times” (see Chapter 19), and, no less fortissimo, so too “Athena and Pallas, image, copies, fakes and doubles,” busy with statuary and sculpture fudgelore – and its mytho-graphic texts (see Chapter 9).