another motivation, or combination of motivations, in the case of Dionysius the Renegade. One could argue that Dionysius perpetrated his fraudulent play, the Parthenopaeus, principally in order to see if he could get away with it. Or he may have done it to make a fool out of his nemesis, Heraclides. We have other instances in the ancient world of a similar motivation, to pull the wool over someoneâs, or everyoneâs, eyes. As it turns out, some such motivation may still be at work in our world today, as some scholars have thought that one of the most famous âdiscoveriesâ of an ancient Gospel in the twentieth century was in fact a forgery by the scholar who claimed to have discovered it. This is the famous Secret Gospel of Mark allegedly found by Morton Smith in 1958. 16
Other authors forged documents for political or military ends. The Jewish historian Josephus, for example, reports that an enemy of Alexander, the son of King Herod, forged a letter in Alexanderâs name in which he announced plans to murder his father. According to Josephus, the forger was a secretary of the king who was âa bold man, cunning in counterfeiting anyoneâs hand.â But the plan back-fired; after producing numerous forgeries, the man was caught and âwas at last put to death for it.â 17
Political forgeries were usually not treated kindly. But sometimes they worked. In the third century the Roman emperor Aurelian had a private secretary, named Eros, who had incurred his masterâs anger and was about to be punished. To forestall the outcome, he forged a list of names of political leaders whom the emperor had supposedlydecided to have executed for treason and put the forged list into circulation. The men on the list rose up and assassinated the emperor. 18
Sometimes the motivation for a forgery was less political than religiousâto defend religious institutions or practices or to defend oneâs religious claims against those of opponents. One of the more humorous accounts occurs in the writings of the second-century pagan author Lucian of Samosata, a brilliant wit and keen critic of all things hypocritical. One of Lucianâs hilarious treatises, Alexander the False Prophet, is directed against a man named Alexander, who wanted to set up an âoracleââthat is, a place where a god would communicate with humansâin the town of Abunoteichos. Alexander was a crafty fellow who knew that he had to convince people that the god Apollo really had decided to communicate through him, Alexander, at this newly founded place of prophecy, since he planned to receive payments for being able to deliver Apolloâs pronouncements to those who would come to inquire. So, according to Lucian, Alexander forged a set of bronze tablets and buried them in one of the oldest and most famous of Apolloâs temples, in the city of Chalcedon. When the tablets were then dug up, word got around about what was written in this âmiraculousâ find. On these tablets Apollo declared that he was soon to move to take up residence in a new home, in Abunoteichos. Alexander then established the oracle there and attracted a huge following, thanks in no small measure to the forged writings in the name of the god he claimed to represent.
An example of a Jewish forgery created to support Judaism can be found in the famous Letter of Aristeas. 19 Aristeas was allegedly a pagan member of the court of the Egyptian king Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285â246 BCE ). In this letter âAristeasâ describes how the king decided to include a copy of the Jewish Scriptures in his expanding library, and so he made arrangements with the Jewish high priest in Israel to send scholars to Egypt who could translate the sacred texts from their original Hebrew language into Greek. Seventy-two scholars were sent, and through miraculous divine intervention they managed to produce, individually, precisely the same wording for