In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great

by David Grant

  In the fraudulent process, Annius’ work paradoxically gave us the valuable concept of primary, secondary, and tertiary sources, the foundation of the methodology that distinguishes ‘eyewitnesses’ from those who drew from their testimonia, while relegating to ‘tertiary’ the writers even further removed from events. As it has been pointed out, though devoted entirely to fakes, his categorisation is the earliest extant Renaissance epigraphic treatise.33 Annius’ emphasis on chronology and inscriptions, and his rules of historical evidence alongside his linguistic theories, were all adopted in some form in later historiographical methods, the disciplines that ironically sealed his own fate. He was indeed a lead blade that slipped out of the ivory scabbard housing classical literature.

  Contemporary with Annius was Abbot Johannes Trithemius, a theologian, moralist and antiquarian born in 1462. Trithemius concocted a history of the Franks from the fall of Troy up to King Clovis (ca. 466-511 CE) who first united them, claiming ancient Frankish manuscripts as his unimpeachable source. He managed to ‘trace’ the Habsburg House back to Noah, enabling the Emperor Maximilian I, with whom he was on good terms, to follow his illustrious line back to Theodoric and King Arthur.34 As Trithemius noted: ‘everyone was trying to find himself a Trojan ancestor’, as Alexander had himself.35

  But the likes of Erasmus were hot on the heels of duplicity. He set a tone of enlightenment when exposing the apocryphal correspondence known as the Epistles of St Paul;36 it was long overdue according to Arnaldo Momigliano who noted that the letters between the apostle and Seneca were written in atrocious Latin when perhaps more convincingly Greek would have been used.37 But there is an irony in implicating Seneca in the correspondence, for the stoic philosopher had stated of historians in general: ‘Some are deluded, some delighted, by falsehood… the whole clan of them have this in common; they fancy their work cannot merit approval, and become popular unless they freely interlard it with lies.’38

  Annius’ fall from grace came in the form of Johannes Goropius Becanus (1519-1572) and Joseph Scaliger who brought their deep knowledge of classical Greek and Latin to bear on his Antiquities; their philological autopsies were capitalising on developments in Renaissance historiography and laying the foundations of Quellenforschung.39 But these developing historiographical processes did not kill the industry of falsification; they simply sharpened the wits of future pretenders peddling their wares; as more deceptions and fakes fell out of the closet, some occasionally fell in. Laurentius Valla had already exposed the Donation of Constantine, a forged decree that placed a good deal of the Western Roman Empire under the authority of the Pope.40 The ‘donation’ enjoyed a long legacy; it helped legitimise the ‘returning’ of lands by the Frankish king, Pepin the Short, to papal control in 756 CE and it was not acknowledged by the church as spurious until 1440. It nevertheless took the Catholic fathers 500 years to ‘re-donate’ the Papal States back to Italy in 1929, the year the Lateran Accords recognised the Vatican as an independent state.

  A page from Laurentius Valla’s De falso credita et ementita Constantini Donatione declamatio. Described as one of the ‘monuments of historical criticism’, Valla attacks the Donation of Constantine, an 8th century forgery which supported the papacy’s claim to supreme political authority in Europe. Valla’s work made it clear that the text could not have been written in the fourth century, the age of Constantine the Great, by revealing many anachronisms in form and content. This annotated edition was printed in Basel in 1520. Digitised by the CAMENA Project, Heidelberg-Mannheim.

  The son of an Italian scholar portentously christened Julius Caesar, Scaliger, who was the first person to identify Indo-European linguistic groupings, is remembered for his appreciation that classical historiography should include the Persian, Babylonian, Jewish and Ancient Egyptian records, beside the Greek and Roman accounts that dominated Western interpretations of the classical age.41

  Somewhat inevitably, the ‘barbarian’ finds of Annius, those credited to Berossus, Metasthenes and Manetho, for example, eventually came under scrutiny. In fact these ‘rediscovered’ historians were broadly contemporary with Alexander, if we accept that Megasthenes the Greek travelographer, rather than the otherwise unattested ‘Metasthenes’, was Annius’ intended reincarnation. Perhaps this was a correction supposed to reinforce his pedantic philological zeal, for ‘to throw together the real and the fictitious is an old device of verisimilitude and deceit’, and it may explain Annius’ own contention: ‘Authors can both deceive and be deceived but an imposed name cannot.’42

  As for the fate of Annius, he was (it is claimed) finally – and philologists might deem fittingly – poisoned by Cesare Borgia. Cesare’s alleged father, Rodrigo Borgia, had already furnished the living quarters in the Vatican with images of the great Macedonian conqueror; indeed when elected Pope in August 1492 he assumed the name ‘Alexander VI’.43 Annius had placed an importance on onomastics, the derivation of proper names in the historical framework that provided him with his ‘irrefutable arguments’.44 He had etched-on with his own hand many of the Etruscan inscriptions he claimed to have found, and so we may reflectively deem them ‘primary fabrications’ of pseudoarchaeology. His real name was Giovanni Nanni though he had adopted a title more reminiscent of the Roman golden age; like Alexander, he was attempting to fuse his own imagery with another heroic past.

  IN NOMINE PATRIS, DIAIREI KAI BASILEUE45

  Annius’ own deceits unwittingly motioned the wheels of historiographical method and provide us with ‘an organon for arriving at historical truth’. Although the later proponents of Quellenforschung have done much for historiographic methodology, even if they exhibited bias when doing so,46 its operators have not, and it was the heavy hand of religious doctrine that played the weightiest role in the loss of what once graced the library shelves. The sobering truth behind our library of classics is a stark one: we have nothing more than a very narrow cross-section of the literary output of the creative minds of antiquity. We might ponder what remained after Caliph Omar (579-644 CE) burned the ‘infidel’ Library at Alexandria (ca. 641 CE) and fuelled the 4,000 furnaces heating the city’s bathhouses for over six months from the contents, though the historicity of the infamous destruction cannot be confirmed.47

  Much of the polemical noise emerging in the Renaissance was piously motivated, for the new age of rational analysis still fought a stubborn tradition of faith, so the ‘enlightenment’ was not seen as a universally popular movement.48 Goropius was ridiculed by Scaliger for his attempt at palaeolinguistics in which he claimed that Antwerpian Brabantic (a Dutch dialect) was the oldest (and so the ‘father’) of all languages (anticipating Indo-European linguistic theory) and so spoken in Paradise by Adam. Even Scaliger felt the backlash of his own autopsies; the Jesuits attacked him for exposing the authenticity of their New Testament compilations and their associated chronologies in his De emendatione temporum (1583) and Thesaurus temporum (1606). There commenced a literary battle with his former friend and church defender, Gasparus Scioppius, who published his retort, the Scaliger Hypobolimaeus, in which polemics and refutations were hurled back and forth.49

  In October 1623 Digory Whear dedicated a treatise titled De Ratione et Methodo Legendi Historias dissertatio to fellow historian William Camden.50 Summing up the extant accounts, and mentioning Annius’ deceipts, Whear’s ‘plan and method’ for reading history cited the Roman antiquarians Varro and Censorinus (3rd century CE) who proposed three distinct epochs had existed: the Creation to the flood, which they named ‘the unclear’; the flood to the first Greek Olympiad, termed ‘the mythical’; and the first Olympiad down to the Roman Caesars, which they sensibly proposed was ‘the historical’.

  In contrast to the Varronian Chronology, which had creatively anchored down Rome’s own founding (April 21st 753 BCE) and the city’s past by inserting ‘anarchic’ and ‘dictatorial’ years to fill chronological gaps,51 Whear saw the first epoch as ‘clearer than the noonday sun’, citing the first six chapters
of Genesis as an impeccable source of these 1,656 years. He next argued away the mythical, suggesting the holy secretaries, Moses and the prophets, had provided a ‘sufficiently ample history’ of that period. Ironically, Whear then challenged the integrity of the final ‘historical’ epoch, admitting, however, that it was ‘distinguished by exact dates’. He rounded off with: ‘All of these are to be read after biblical history, which is the oldest of all, and the truest.’52

  Whear would have been mortified to hear that, ‘arguably the most distinctive feature of early Christian literature is the degree to which it was forged’, for ‘orthodoxy and its faithful follower, persecution, encouraged literary dishonesty’.53 This is a contention that explains why publications like Speyer’s 300-page Die Literarische Fälschung im heidnischen und christlichen Altertum were needed to keep track of them.54 Speyer was able to identify twenty-six Greek linguistic terms, with Latin parallels such as adultere, configure, falsare and supponere, associated with the act of forgery, suggesting a fraudulent tradition had already proliferated the classical world.55

  The Christian Church, or rather religion per se, had a legacy of ‘pious fraud’ (a term first used by Gibbon) to protect the potency of its proprietary texts and so the continued loyalty (and donations) of its congregation. It explains the fervour with which Scioppius defended Catholicism and the zeal with which the Church issued the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. From spurious reincarnations of biblical scrolls, the Sibylline Oracles and Gnostic Gospels, elements of The Apostolic Constitutions, the aforementioned epistolary corpus between St Paul and Seneca and the Decretals of Pseudo-Isidore, religious falsification spurred a literary genre of erudite pious defence and attack. Much of that corpus took the form of forgery and counter forgery too.56

  Eusebius, whose lost Kronographia was diligently reconstructed by Scaliger, had added to the problem long before. In his Ecclesiastical History (ca. 312 CE) he declared: ‘We shall introduce to this history, in general, only those events, which may be useful first to ourselves and after to prosperity.’57 Gibbon attacked Eusebius for proposing that falsifications were a lawful and necessary ‘medicine’ for historians.58 It did Gibbon little good; although the first volume of his own book (published 1776) was so well received that it was ‘on every table and on almost every toilet’, he credited Christianity with a big part in the fall of Rome, an event which ‘annihilated the noisesome recesses in which lurked the seeds of great moral maladies’, leaving the Church fathers no option but to add his epic to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.59

  A copy of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum containing a list of publications banned by the Catholic Church and first enforced by Pope Paul IV in 1559. This edition was produced in the reign of Philip II of Spain and dated 1570. The Index was not formally abolished until 1966 in the papacy of Pope Paul VI.

  Eusebius claimed that a document had appeared early in the 4th century purporting to be the Pagan Acts of Pilate filled with slanders against the character of Jesus. The author, possibly Theotecnus, a violent persecutor of the Church at Antioch, issued an edict that schoolmasters should have their pupils study and memorise the contents.60 There were however many Acta Pilati entering circulation including those which came to be known as the Gospel of Nicodemus, and they were collected by the scholar Constantin von Tischendorf in his 1853 Evangelica Apocrypha. Pontius Pilate, the prefect or procurator of Judea from 26-36 CE and the infamous judge of Jesus, is, however, a vexatious character himself. Conflicting texts pose him as Dacian, Sarmatian, Samnite, and even of Scottish descent. The ‘Roman’ Tacitus, who possibly hailed from Gaul, linked Pilate to misfortune at the hands of the Emperor Caligula with a tragic death in Vienne (Vienna). In fact, solid proof of Pilate’s historicity outside of (principally) biblical texts evaded us until the so-called Stone of Pilate was unearthed near Caesarea in 1961.61

  Eusebius, once again setting out to undermine paganism, found use for a regurgitation of the already semi-fictional work named Phoenician History by Philo of Byblos (ca. 64-141 CE); he slanted it with his own evangelical agenda leaving us wondering whether Philo’s source, a certain Sanchuniathon, really existed or not.62

  In the Hellenistic era, and then later in the twilight years of the Roman Empire, new philosophies were fighting for recognition, and old ones for survival; religions too (‘fossilised philosophies’ in which the ‘questioning spirit has been supressed’) were fighting for the souls of kings, tyrants and emperors.63 One of the bolder attempts at self-promotion came in the form of the so-called Letter of Aristeas, a sophisticated subterfuge explaining the origins behind the translation of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Septuagint, the Hebrew Bible. It was written in the koine Greek, now the lingua franca of the Eastern Mediterranean. Seeking to promote Jewish interests in Alexandria, the letter, supposedly written by a gentile, Aristeas, to his brother, Philocrates, detailed the role of its seventy-two translators (six from each of the twelve tribes of Israel) with their deep philosophical knowledge.

  Central to the letter is an ingenious documentary dialogue between Demetrius of Phalerum and Ptolemy II Philadelphos, in which the former sought to acquire Jewish texts for the Alexandrian Library in an attempt to elevate their significance.64 Demetrius, who compiled the Lopson Aisopeion sunagoga, a collection of the fables of Aesop for use by orators, had allegedly advised his king: ‘It is important that these books, duly corrected, should find a place in your library, because this legislation, in as much as it is divine, is of philosophical importance and of innate integrity.’65 Over twenty manuscripts of the letters survived, the first mentioned in Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities, and though it has now been convincingly exposed (after 1522), the Letter of Aristeas remains the oldest surviving document attesting to the existence of the great Alexandrian Library within the Museion founded by the Ptolemies.66 Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum – ‘such are the crimes to which religion leads’, the Epicurean poet Lucretius reflected in his On the Nature of Things.67

  ‘SPIN ME A THREAD FROM THE WORLD’S BEGINNING’.68

  Aware as we are that that no primary source material survived for the period under our particular scrutiny – the ‘books’ written by the eyewitnesses to Alexander’s campaigns and the era of the Diadokhoi – we need to further appreciate that neither did the original scrolls and codices of the secondary and tertiary historians who preserved them. Although manuscripts credited to these Hellenistic and Roman-era historians sat in medieval libraries across Europe, they were more often than not poor translations of much earlier vellums and papyri that had themselves been survivors of an earlier discriminatory process.

  At the Library in Alexandria kritikoi had been employed to oversee the process of separation and judgment (the krisis) which decided what scrolls were to be copied and have a chance of survival as a result. So the antiquated books we enjoy today are the survivors of a selection process that commenced far earlier in our story, one that was itself at times judicious, occasionally malicious, and more often, grossly negligent too. The lucky manuscripts became hoi enkrithentes, the ‘admitted few’, which, if they were fortunate enough, were copied from papyrus to parchment and eventually into industrial print. This was a perilous journey that shaped the canon of what we read today.

  The establishment of the two great public libraries at Alexandria and Pergamum (modern Bergama in Western Turkey) in the Hellenistic era created a massive demand for the works of famous authors, predating the Renaissance industry in fakes by some 1,500 years. Galen, the Greek self-titled ‘doctor-philosopher’ who cut his teeth patching up gladiators in Pergamum, reported that ‘the recklessness of forging books and titles began’ when the kings of Egypt and the Attalids sought to outdo one another in the number of scrolls on their competing library shelves, ‘… for there were those who, to increase the price of their books, attached the names of great authors to them and then sold them to nobility.’69

  It was Callimachus and his Pinakes (literally, ‘tables’), the 120-volume
list of the genuine against the ‘pseudos’, which brought some kind of order to the growing corpus of works being catalogued and copied in Alexandria.70 The Ptolemies, voracious collectors, confiscated original books from the incoming vessels and marked them ex ploion,‘from the ships’, compensating the owners with a new ex scriptorium copy.71 Ptolemy III Euergetes later swindled the Athenians out of many of their originals, forfeiting a fifteen-talent bond.72 Financial rewards were offered for the more valuable texts and in consequence many imitations of ancient works were passed off as genuine, especially those of Alexander’s teacher, Aristotle, a prized catch according to Ammonius Saccas, the 3rd century Alexandrian philosopher.73 Certainly Aristotle’s De Mundo, once thought to be a dedication to Alexander, fell apart under the Renaissance scrutiny of Daniel Heinsius (1580-1655), Scaliger’s gifted pupil, and Isaac Casaubon, a regular correspondent with the by-now-famous philologist who provided the attendant commentaries. Casaubon went on to edit a number of classical works that feature in our study and his magnum opus was a commentary of Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae, The Dinner Philosophers, a rich source of historical detail found nowhere else.

  Galen, prodigious in his writing, indignantly described how both his own medical works and the writings of Hippocrates had been corrupted by the interpolations of unscrupulous and careless editors; it prompted him to publish On His Own Books to help identify the works truly his. This may have assisted Diogenes Laertius when gathering the doxographies for his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, that is if he did not simply plagiarise Diocles of Magnesia (2nd or 1st century BCE), as Friedrich Nietzsche supposed. Though the collection remains a rich biographical potpourri, we must assume much misattribution occurred, a suspicion reinforced by Diogenes himself who pointed to the frequent contradictions in his sources.74 Winding up his Life of Aristotle, Diogenes commented: ‘There are, also, a great many other works attributed to him, and a number of apophthegms which he never committed to paper.’75