Both of these terms are negative, not neutral, and they show what ancients thought about the practice of forgery. An author who produces a writing in the name of someone else has produced a “false writing,” “a lie,” “an illegitimate child,” or a “bastard.” Similar words are used by Latin writers for the act of forgery, for example, words that mean “to lie,” “to falsify,” “to fabricate,” “to adulterate,” “to counterfeit.”
Contrary to what some scholars have claimed (again, see Chapter 4) forgers in the ancient world typically wanted to deceive their readers by claiming to be persons of authority and standing. This has been long recognized by the real experts in ancient forgery.32 And a moment’s reflection shows why this must be the case. Consider the motivations for forgery mentioned earlier. Forgers who wanted to see if they could get away with it, to see if they could pull the wool over someone’s eyes, would scarcely have tried to make their ploy transparent and obvious; they would have truly wanted to deceive people. If they wanted to make money by producing an “original” copy of, say, a dialogue of Plato, they wouldn’t get very far if everyone knew who they really were. If they wanted to justify a political institution or religious practice by citing the views of an authority or wanted to have their own views accepted as authoritative even if they themselves were completely unknown, it would make no sense to claim to be someone else knowing full well that no one would believe you.
That forgery was not a transparent fiction is evidenced as well by the negative things people say about it in the ancient sources—the practice, as I have argued, is condemned in virtually every instance it is discussed. Moreover, the reactions to forgers when they are caught show quite clearly that they meant to deceive, that they were often successful, and that people were not at all pleased when they discovered the truth. Galen and Martial were incensed to find someone else claiming their name for writings they did not produce. And sometimes the reaction was even more hostile.
The first time we hear of a forger being discovered occurs all the way back in the fifth century BCE, in the writings of the famous Greek historian Herodotus.33 In a puzzling and enigmatic passage, Herodotus speaks of Onomacritus of Athens, who had invented an oracle (i.e., a prophecy from a divine being) and ascribed it to the ancient bard Musaeus, a mythical figure thought to be able to predict the future. This oracle indicated that a certain group of islands would sink into the sea. It is hard to understand why Onomacritus forged the oracle or why people were upset by it. But they were. The ruler of Athens, Hipparchus, banished Onomacritus from the city; he fled Greece and ended up in Persia. On yet other occasions Onomacritus was thought to have forged other oracles and was roundly chastised for it by other ancient authors, such as Plutarch.34
Sometimes the punishment for forgery was even more harsh. Earlier I mentioned the fifty obscene letters that the philosopher Diotimus forged in the name of Epicurus in order to sully his reputation. According to one ancient source, Epicurus’s followers were not amused. One of them, a man named Zeno, tracked Diotimus down and murdered him for it.35 This can be compared with the account already mentioned by the Jewish historian Josephus, who indicates that someone forged a letter in the name of Alexander, son of King Herod, indicating Alexander’s plan to assassinate his father. As we have seen, the forger was the king’s own secretary, who, according to Josephus, “was at last put to death for it.”
From all of the discussions of forgeries in ancient sources, I think we can safely draw several major conclusions. Forgery was widely practiced in the ancient world, among pagans, Jews, and Christians. Forgers, motivated by a range of factors, intended to deceive their readers. Ancient authors who discuss the practice condemned it and considered it a form of lying and deceit. Forgers who were caught were reprimanded or punished even more severely.
Possible Justifications for Forgery
THE MOST THOROUGH STUDY of ancient forgery ever undertaken, by the Austrian classical scholar Wolfgang Speyer, maintains: “Every forgery feigns a state of affairs that does not correspond to the actual facts of the case. For this reason forgery belongs to the realm of lying and deception.”36 This view coincides perfectly well with the one I have been trying to make in this chapter, but it leaves us with a problem. When we are considering Christian forgeries, in particular, we are dealing with writings produced by followers of Jesus, who presumably ascribed to Jesus’s ethical teachings and the moral norms set forth in the Hebrew Scriptures. Surely they knew that lying and deception were wrong. Why would they do what they knew was wrong? And surely the question applies to pagans and Jews as well, who as a whole were just as ethical as Christians. Why would any of them go against their own ethical views?
On one level, of course, the question is silly. All people do things they know are wrong. But I mean the question at a deeper level. Did the forgers who perpetrated their fraud think that they were justified in lying? Is lying ever justified? I return to this issue in Chapter 8, but for now I should at least set the stage by asking a more general question. What did people in antiquity think about lying and deceit?
Asking what ancient people thought about lying is like asking modern people—it depends completely on whom you ask. Some think lying is never acceptable under any circumstances; others think that in some circumstances it is the ethical thing to do. Yet others think nothing at all about lying whenever they feel like it, thank you very much!
Some ancient Greek philosophers, notably Aristotle, stressed the importance of normally being truthful.37 But most philosophers thought there could be exceptions. Xenophon, for example, reports Socrates as saying it is a good thing to lie to a sick son or a friend who wants to commit suicide, if you can stop the person from doing so.38 Socrates also said that it is useful for a field general to lie to his disheartened troops in battle, telling them that support troops are soon to arrive, in order to drive them to fight with greater valor; or for a parent to deceive a child into taking some unpleasant medicine that will be good for her. Plato taught that some lies can be useful, such as those doctors might tell patients for their own good or those rulers of a country might tell their people in order to ensure the healthy functioning of society. As one ancient writer, Heliodorus, put it: “A lie is good when it benefits the one who speaks it without doing harm to the one who hears.”39
But what about Christians? Weren’t they taught always to tell the truth? That is certainly what the great fifth-century church theologian Augustine taught in his two treatises devoted to “lying.” It is never, ever, under any circumstances permissible to lie. This view of Augustine’s was not based on a simplistic sense that it is always good to tell the truth, but on deep theological understandings about what it means to be truly human in relationship to the God of truth, who himself became fully human.40
But lots of other Christian thinkers, both before and after Augustine, thought otherwise. Some, such as the important Christian thinker Clement of Alexandria at the end of the second century, as well as his Alexandrian compatriot at the beginning of the third, Origen—arguably the most important theologian of the church before Augustine—agreed with Plato about the “medicinal lie”: if a doctor’s lie will impel a patient to take her medicine, it is ethically justified.41 Both of them also pointed out that in the Old Testament, God himself appears to use deception at times. When God told Jonah to proclaim to the city of Nineveh that in forty days it would be overthrown, he obviously knew full well that the people would repent and that he would stay his hand of judgment. God never did plan, then, to overthrow the city, even though that’s what he told his prophet to proclaim. Sometimes a deceptive statement can do a world of good.
There are plenty of other examples in Scripture in which the lies of God’s chosen ones lead to good ends. If Abraham had not lied about his wife Sarah (“she’s my sister”), he would have been killed, and the nation of Israel would never have come into existence (Gen. 12). Or if Rahab the prostitute had not lied about where the Israelite spies were hiding, they may ha
ve been killed and the children of Israel may never have been able to conquer the promised land (Josh. 2). Examples could be multiplied. Sometimes lying is the right thing to do.
Is that what forgers thought? That lying about who they were was worth it? That the good effects of their deception outweighed the bad? That the ends justified the means?
I’m afraid we may never know what drove these people to do what they did. We simply can’t peer into their hearts and minds to see what they were thinking, deep down, when they decided to hide their own identity and to claim, deceitfully, that they were someone else. Their readers, had they known, would probably have called them liars and condemned what they did. But in their own eyes, their conscience may have been free from blame, and their motives may have been as pure as the driven snow. They had a truth to convey, and they were happy to lie in order to proclaim it.
CHAPTER TWO
Forgeries in the Name of Peter
UP TO THIS POINT IN my discussion of ancient lying, deception, and forgery I have been using the term “truth” in a very simple sense, to mean something like “correct information.” In reality, though, truth and its opposite, falsehood, are complex. I think we all recognize this deep down, even if we haven’t given it a good deal of thought. When we watch a movie, we often ask, “Is this a true story?” By that we mean, “Is this something that really happened?” If the answer is yes, then we somehow feel assured and comforted that the events took place, and so, as a story, it is “truer” than one that is just made up. But even then we never think that absolutely everything found in the movie—all of the characters, the dialogue, the individual scenes, and so on—is absolutely and completely the way it “really” happened. We allow for a kind of poetic license of distortion, even when acknowledging that the story is somehow “true.”
One could easily make the case that a movie can be true in a deeper sense even if it is about something that never happened. This has been my view for many years, and it used to drive my kids crazy when they were young. We’d be watching a movie, and they’d say, “Dad, is this a true story?” And I’d almost always say yes. But then they’d remember that I tend to have a different view of things, and they’d ask the follow-up question, “No, Dad, I mean did this really happen?” I’d say no, and they’d continue to be puzzled.
As some of my readers may be. How can a story be “true” if it didn’t happen? In point of fact, there are all sorts of true stories that didn’t happen, as everyone will admit, I think, if they think about it a bit. When I try to illustrate this with my students, I usually rehearse for them the story of George Washington and the cherry tree.
True Stories That Didn’t Happen
EVERY GRADE-SCHOOL KID IN the country knows the cherry tree story. As a young boy, George Washington, for unknown reasons, took a hatchet to his father’s cherry tree. When his father came home, he saw the tree and asked, “Who chopped down my cherry tree?” Young George answered, “I cannot tell a lie. I did it.” The way the story is normally told, we don’t find out what happened afterwards—was young George taken out to the woodshed? The story ends with George’s one-liner.1
We know that this story never happened, because the person who invented the tale later admitted to having done so. He was a Christian minister named Mason Locke Weems, usually known as Parson Weems. As a later biographer of Washington, Parson Weems confessed that he made up the story, even though he once had claimed that he received it from a credible eyewitness (a nice paradox: he “told a lie” in this story about not lying).
Here, then, is a story that we know is nonhistorical. But we still tell it to our children. Why? Not because we are trying to teach them about the facts of colonial history, but because we think the story conveys a “truth” that we want our children to learn. The truth claims of the story actually work on several levels. On one level the story is a good piece of political propaganda for the United States. Who was George Washington? He was the father of our nation. What kind of person was he? He was an honest man, a man who would never tell a lie. Really? How honest was he? Well, one day when he was a kid…The conclusion is clear. This country is founded on honesty. This country is honest. This country cannot tell a lie. Or so the story goes.
But the story of George Washington and the cherry tree functions on another level as well, and this is probably why most parents are glad their kids learn it. This is a story about personal morality and responsibility. I told the story to my kids because I wanted them to be like young George. Even if they did something wrong, I wanted them to come clean and tell the truth about it. It is better to be truthful and face the consequences than to live a life of dishonesty. It is better not to tell a lie.
My point is that fiction, even historical fiction, can in some sense convey “truth” even if it is something that “didn’t happen.” Truth is more than simply correct information.
That does not mean, however, that there is no such thing as falsehood. Quite the contrary, there are plenty of kinds of falsehood: incorrect information, flat-out deception, stories that convey messages that we do not accept as “true” based on our understanding of the world.2 If I were to read a story about the childhood of Joseph Stalin that stressed his inherently sweet disposition, his kind, gentle nature, and his deep concern for the well-being of others, I would say that the story is false.
Ancient people also had a more nuanced sense of truth and falsehood; they too had stories that they accepted as “true” in some sense without thinking that they actually happened.3 Most scholars today recognize that the majority of educated people in ancient Greece and Rome did not literally believe that the myths about the gods had actually happened historically. They were stories intending to convey some kind of true understanding of the divine realm and humans’ relationship to it. And ancients had their equivalents of modern fiction. It is true, as some scholars have emphasized, that modern notions of fiction are much more sophisticated and nuanced than anything you can find in antiquity. But in addition to myths ancient people had epic poems, legends, and novels (sometimes called “romances”), which correspond in many ways to the forms of fictional narrative that we have today. People didn’t tell and retell, read and recite these forms of fiction simply because they thought they were literally true, but for much the same reason that we read fiction today: for entertainment, to learn something, to help them understand themselves and their world better.
The notion of “fiction” is very interesting. If we read a book that claims to be an authorized biography of Ronald Reagan, we expect it to stick to the facts and not to convey historically incorrect information. But if we read a novel about a president of the United States in the 1980s—a book that touts itself as pure fiction—we may expect some kinds of historical verisimilitude (the president would not be shown surfing the Internet or checking his wall on Facebook), but we do not expect to be given actual historical facts about an actual historical person. Ancient equivalents to modern fiction worked the same way. Readers expected the narrative to make some kind of historical sense—that is, to be plausible—but they did not expect the story to match up to the facts of historical reality.
The difference between a modern biography and a modern novel, of course, is a matter of literary genre. Scholars have long and protracted debates over what the notion of “genre” actually means, but for our purposes I think a fairly rough and ready description will suffice. A genre is a “kind” of writing that fits certain expected forms. A short story is short, for example; a novel is longer. Both have characters and plot and other shared features that make them different from a haiku. A limerick poem has clever rhymes and a surprising punch line. Free verse has neither, but relies on the depth of the language to convey meaning. And so on. The characteristics of each type of genre represent a sort of implied agreement between an author and readers. It is almost a contractual agreement in which the author provides what is expected for this kind of writing, and readers are not allowed to expect anything other than
what typically happens in this kind of writing.
When it comes to fiction, in nearly all its forms, readers agree to suspend judgment on the historical accuracy of the details of the narrative, while expecting, nonetheless, that the account will be historically plausible.4 The reason fiction works is that, for the sake of being entertained, readers are willing to make this tacit agreement with an author.
When it comes to biography or historical writing, however, readers do not make this agreement. In this case the author agrees to stick to the historical facts insofar as she can, and readers expect her to do so. Any breach of this contract is seen as a violation of the rules and is condemned.
In ancient historical writing the matter was a bit more complicated. In large part that was because in antiquity there simply weren’t the research tools available that we have today: extensive access to reliable sources, copious written records, databases, data retrieval systems, the possibilities given us by mass media and electronic modes of communication. Ancient historians had to do their best to cobble together a plausible narrative of past events. It was very hard indeed to give an “accurate” account, though most historians tried. Nowhere was this more obviously a problem than in recording the actual words of someone who lived a long time ago. Some of the best histories from antiquity are chock full of speeches given by their main characters. But if the events took place decades or even centuries earlier, in an age before there were tape recorders, or even stenographers and same-day reporting, how was a historian to know what the character actually said? There was, in fact, no way to know.
For that reason, a superb historian such as the fifth-century BCE Thucydides explicitly states that he simply made up the speeches himself. What choice did ancient historians have? The best they could do was to invent a speech that seemed appropriate to the character of the speaker and the occasion and trust that it was a more or less close approximation of what was actually said. There was no way of showing whether the historian got it right. But educated readers realized that this is what the historians were doing, and so here again there was a kind of understood contract between author and readers; the author would come up with his best guess at what a speaker said and readers would accept it for what it was, a best guess.
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