The First Pagan Historian

The Fortunes of a Fraud from Antiquity to the Enlightenment

Author Frederic Clark

First comprehensive account of The History of the Destruction of Troy
Emphasizes the importance of forgery in the history of the classical canon
Contributes to the rapidly growing field of classical reception studies
Offers a new take on the longstanding battle between history and fiction

The First Pagan Historian

The Fortunes of a Fraud from Antiquity to the Enlightenment

Author Frederic Clark

Description

In The History of the Destruction of Troy, Dares the Phrygian boldly claimed himself as eyewitness to the Trojan War, challenging the accounts of two of the ancient world's most canonical poets, Homer and Virgil. For over a milennium, Dares' work was circulated as the first pagan history. It promised facts and only facts about what really happened at Troy--precise casualty figures, no mentions of mythical phenomena, and a claim that Troy fell when Aeneas and other Trojans betrayed their city and opened gates to the Greeks. But for all its intrigue, the work was as sensational as it was fake.

From the late antique encyclopedist Isidore of Seville to Thomas Jefferson, The First Pagan Historian offers the first comprehensive account of Dares' rise and fall. Along the way, it reconstructs Dares' central place in longstanding debates over the nature of history, fiction, criticism, philology, and myth, from ancient Rome to the Enlightenment.

The First Pagan Historian

The Fortunes of a Fraud from Antiquity to the Enlightenment

Author Frederic Clark

Introduction
Dares Phrygius, First Pagan Historian

Chapter One
Dares Forged: Histories Real and Imagined in the Classical and Late Antique Worlds

Chapter Two
Dares Compiled: From Ancient History to Medieval Genealogy

Chapter Three
Dares Translated: Historical Veracity and Poetic Fiction

Chapter Four
Dares Attacked: Early Modern Criticism and the Formation of an Ancient Canon

Chapter Five
Dares Printed and Philologized: The Ebbs and Flows of a Forger's Fortunes

Chapter Six
Dares Survives: Webs of Misattribution and the Persistence of the Distant Past

Conclusion
The Perennial Quarrel: Dares between Ancients and Moderns, Truth and Falsehood

The First Pagan Historian

The Fortunes of a Fraud from Antiquity to the Enlightenment

Author Frederic Clark

Author Information

Frederic Clark is a cultural and intellectual historian who specializes in the afterlife of classical antiquity in medieval and early modern Europe. His research examines how the reception of the ancient past informed-and continues to inform-practices of humanistic scholarship. He is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Southern California.