The First Pagan Historian: The Fortunes of a Fraud from Antiquity to the Enlightenment

Abstract

In this impressive first book, Clark explores the extraordinary history of the Destruction of Troy by Dares the Phrygian. Dares's account of the fall of Troy is a short, Latin prose narrative that claims to be an eyewitness account of the Trojan War, translated from the Phrygian by Cornelius Nepos, the Roman historian, and sent to Sallust, another, even more famous Roman historian. Dares's text came to light as late antiquity turned into the medieval era, and Dares was promptly hailed as “the first pagan historian”—a predecessor of Homer—by Isidore of Seville. Throughout the medieval period, a series of scholars were transfixed by Dares. His text was taken as the earliest and thus most reliable source for the world-changing event of the Trojan War—which led to the foundation of Rome and the shape of the West. It was exciting not just for its antiquity but also for its polemical revision of the standard received story. Not only did its prefatory letter claim—with a nicely rationalizing rhetoric—that even the Athenians declared Homer was “insane” for imagining that gods and humans might meet on the battlefield, but also, even more alluringly, Dares stated that Aeneas, the pious hero of Virgil's Aeneid, was a traitor who had sold out Troy to the Greeks: he escaped the sack to found Rome because he had opened the doors of the city to its enemies. The pious Aeneas, exemplary hero, committed the deeply impious act of treachery to his own fatherland. Dares provided a moral rejoinder to later Roman political propaganda and provoked a set of intense debates about the past, its value, and its truth.Early modern humanists were more suspicious. The great scholars Scaliger and Vossius in particular turned their philological fervor against what they saw as an obvious forgery—but even then, not everyone was persuaded. The celebrated Bodin, most surprisingly, still thought Dares represented historical truth. Clark carefully shows how oversimplified the common story of the triumph of humanist learning is. It took a lot of work and much forgetting as well as persuasion for Dares to lose his position. It was indeed only in the Enlightenment that Dares finally passed into the half-light of insignificance reserved for forgeries. One strength of Clark's book is his insistence on trying to discover with generosity and understanding how apparently baffling opinions could be held and argued for—how, that is, the past is a foreign country even and especially where such apparently basic ideas as historical truth are at stake (a topic not without relevance in modern politics).Clark examines in considerable detail across several centuries how Dares was read and mobilized. It is especially satisfying to have a work of reception history that stretches across the modern historiographical divides (of the late antique, medieval, early modern, and Enlightenment periods) and sees how complex the lines of continuity and change are. The naive prose of Dares, in Clark's sophisticated analysis, raises profound questions of what antiquity is and why it matters; how authenticity and authorship are constructed differently across this time period; what the relations are between fiction, truth, and exemplarity (both in theory and in practice); and how texts shift in status and attribution. Dares indeed, as Clark puts it well, “test[s] the meaning and boundaries of antiquity itself.” The range of material is stunning: not only in terms of who read and used Dares but also in terms of the other texts that were read and transformed alongside his. It is remarkable, for example, to see how Joseph of Exeter's medieval hexameters were attributed to Dares (and then reattributed), or how Dares became silently incorporated into a work of Jerome. Despite this richness, I would have liked to see more pages on the relation between pagan and Christian historiography. How does Dares's believed (but false) claim to be an eyewitness relate to Christian claims to witness events (martyr means [eye-]witness)? Philology and its attack on authenticity were key to the battles of the Reformation. Clark could also have spent more time exploring what difference the rediscovery of the Greek text of Homer made to the story of Dares's reception. Homer's rise in the West is part of Dares's fall. In its detail, however, and its range of questions and scope of material, The First Pagan Historian is an exemplary work of reception history.