Scholars at Hallwalls: Imaginative Memory: the Discovery, Reconstruction, and Forgery of the Greek Past

Carolyn Higbie
Park Professor
Department of Classics

In Imaginative Memory: the Discovery, Reconstruction, and Forgery of the Greek Past, I examine a neglected part of Greek intellectual history: the importance of the past to Greeks from the fifth century BC through the second century AD, why this past mattered to them and how they reconstructed it. Their past, known often through physical remains both large and small, was so valued that some were inspired to support their version of it through forgeries and fakes. Greeks depended on physical objects—the helmet of Menelaus, the tomb of Alcmene, the Cyclopean walls of Tiryns—to imagine their history, but many of these remains were either fakes or misinterpreted. Surviving documents show us ancient authors arguing over the genuineness of a claim made for an object and these arguments need to be examined. Such debates run parallel to the literary scholarship at the Library in Alexandria which was being developed from the third century BC, where scholars debated the genuineness of works claimed to be by Homer and others. As Anthony Grafton has observed in his elegant book, Forgers and Critics, both those who create fakes and those who attempt to detect them draw on the same assumptions about the object or the text. I use a wide range of scholarship from other fields in my study of Greek forgery. Students of medieval culture, for example, have devoted much energy to the study of forgery of saints' relics, charters, and texts, developing useful definitions of forgery and concepts like authenticatory devices, whereby a forger attempts to make his fake seem believable. Another area in which much work has been done is in collecting: anthropological studies of modern cultures, Native American and Maori, in particular, provide a starting point for my study of ancient impulses for collecting. Finally, literary forgery and its discovery are subjects long established in Shakespearean scholarship. Their arguments can be fruitfully applied to Greek arguments about the Homeric poems, the biography (or even existence) of Homer, and the physical evidence for the poet's life.