Greco-Roman Religions
A Forger Fooled By Forgery
In my previous post I talked about my scholarly book on forgery (Forgery and Counterforgery) and gave some of the opening paragraphs of the Introduction. Here I’ll give the very first part of the first chapter. I wanted to start out on a light and humorous note, even though I was writing at a scholarly level. And so I began with an amusing anecdote from the annals of ancient forgery, a case where a forger was intentionally deceived by someone else’s forgery, to his deep chagrin. ************************************************************ Heraclides Ponticus was one of the great literati of the classical age. As a young man from aristocratic roots he left his native Pontus to study philosophy in Athens under Plato, Speusippus, and eventually, while he was still in the Academy, Aristotle. During one of Plato’s absences, Heraclides was temporarily put in charge of the school; after the death of Speucippus he was nearly appointed permanent head. His writings spanned a remarkable range, from ethics to dialectics to geometry to physics to astronomy to music to history to literary [...]