Real Renaissance Latin Translations of Newly Discovered Fake Ancient Greek Letters, c. 1450
This elegant twenty-two-line manuscript leaf—ruled lightly in red ink with bright blue and gold illuminated initial letters—represents a solitary fragment from a much larger volume of letters long attributed to the archaic, sixth-century BCE tyrant Phalaris of Agrigento in Sicily. The letters reflect the ancient moralizing “mirror of princes” genre whereby the behaviors of bad rulers were often utilized as vivid representations of how not to rule a principality or kingdom. Amid the Italian Renaissance restoration of ancient Greek literature, the letters of Phalaris enjoyed a revival that endured well into the early eighteenth century, when they were assumed by many to be authentic and among the earliest epistolary literary works in Western literature.
Francesco Griffolini (1420–after 1465), a student of the great humanist and hammer of forgers Lorenzo Valla, undertook to translate the letters of Phalaris between 1440 and 1452, working from a large Greek manuscript in the collection of Pope Nicholas V, who was also founder of the Vatican Library. This work Griffolini dedicated, in turn, to Malatesta Novello of Cesena, an enlightened condottiere who opened the first major municipal “public” research library in Italy, the Biblioteca Malatestiana, in his hometown in 1454—a magnificent chain-book library that survives to the present day. It was also in the 1450s that four additional Greek letters of Phalaris emerged from manuscript courses, which Griffolini duly translated, dedicating them to King Alfonso I of Naples (d. 1458).
The Hopkins Phalaris fragment is of singular significance, for it contains on the recto the final letter dedicatory of Malatesta Novello and, more important, on its verso the beginning of Griffolini’s subsequent dedication of the four newly discovered Phalaris letters to King Alfonso, illuminated in gold leaf. None of these translations would appear in print until the publication of an incunabular Roman edition in 1468–89 by Ulrich Han. The reason for the Hopkins leaf’s fragmentary survival is another part of the story; it formerly belonged to the infamous biblioclast and breaker of early manuscripts and printed books, Otto Ege (1888–1951). Indeed, early manuscript census work records several other surviving leaves from the same Phalaris manuscript, suggesting that Ege may never have owned more than six leaves from the same source manuscript.
Among the most widely read ancient Greek epistolary texts of all time, the letters of Phalaris were consumed for generations until their gradual demolition amid the “Battle of the Books” in Augustan England, which pitted the reputation of ancient literature against the best literary productions of the modern era. Enter the brilliant scholar Richard Bentley, who gradually dismantled the argument for authenticity on sound philological, historical, and logical grounds shortly following his appointment as 1694 royal librarian, proving that the text was actually written some eight centuries later than was widely thought, in the second century CE. Though it is not known from which version of Phalaris Bentley worked, one might well have been the circa 1450 manuscript that had been purchased for the royal library along with others from the private collection of fifty Greek manuscripts formerly owned by the humanist Isaac Casaubon—yet another hammer of forgers, most notably the Corpus Hermeticum—now held by the British Library (Royal MS 16 D II).
The Bibliotheca Fictiva’s holdings surrounding Bentley’s demolition also document the circumstances that partly inspired his campaign against the impossibly ancient letters. Early in his tenure as royal librarian, the credulous editor of Phalaris, Charles Boyle, fourth earl of Orrery, took offense when he felt he had been denied sufficient access to complete a collation of the Greek Phalaris manuscript in the Royal Library, publishing his discontent widely in print. Scandalized by Boyle, Bentley focused his energies, establishing the later dating of the text and positing the further likelihood that Phalaris was the pseudonym of a Hellenistic sophist writing eight centuries hence—possibly Adrianus of Tyre.
The Bibliotheca Fictiva holds one rare copy of Thomas Francklin’s 1749 credulous edition of the Phalaris, still asserting the letters’ authenticity, signed “Orrery. The gift of the author. 1749.” This presentation from Francklin was to John Boyle, fifth earl of Orrery, who also subscribed for ten more copies of the work for wider distribution, if not also as an act of literary loyalty to his father, the fourth earl. However much in denial these latter-day defenders of the text were, it was Friedrich August Wolf, the putative father of Altertumswissenschaft—the total scientific, contextual, and textual-critical study of classical texts beyond authorial personalities—who took Bentley’s “immortal dissertation” on Phalaris as the ultimate model of modern philological method.
—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens
Bibliography
Arthur Freeman, Bibliotheca Fictiva: A Collection of Books & Manuscripts relating to Literary Forgery, 44 BC–AD 2000 (Quaritch, 2014), 4, nos. 35–40; Earle Havens, “Babelic Confusion: Literary Forgery and the Bibliotheca Fictiva,” in Walter Stephens and Earle Havens (eds.), Literary Forgery in Early Modern Europe, 1450–1800 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), 51; Vinko Hinz, Nunc Phalaris doctum protulit ecce caput: Antike Phalarislegende und Nachleben der Phalarisbriefe (K. G. Saur, 2001); D. A. Russell, “The Ass in the Lion’s Skin: Thoughts on the Letters of Phalaris,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 108 (1988): 94–106; Kristine Haugen, Richard Bentley: Poetry and Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 2011); Scott Gwara, Otto Ege’s Manuscripts: A Study of Ege’s Manuscript Collections, Portfolios, and Retail Trade, with a Comprehensive Handlist of Manuscripts Collected or Sold (De Brailes, 2013), no. 84.
