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The First Pagan Historian offers the first comprehensive account of Dares the Phyrgian, the infamous author of
The History of the Destruction of Troy, tracing his afterlife from the late antique encyclopedist Isidore of Seville to Thomas Jefferson. 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.
List of contents
- 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
About the author
Frederic Clark is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Southern California.
Summary
In The History of the Destruction of Troy, Dares the Phrygian boldly claimed to be an eyewitness to the Trojan War, while challenging the accounts of two of the ancient world's most canonical poets, Homer and Virgil. For over a millennium, 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 mention of mythical phenomena, and a claim that Troy fell when Aeneas and other Trojans betrayed their city and opened its gates to the Greeks. But for all its intrigue, the work was as fake as it was sensational.
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 as a reliable and canonical guide to the distant past. Along the way, it reconstructs the central role of forgery in longstanding debates over the nature of history, fiction, criticism, philology, and myth, from ancient Rome to the Enlightenment.
Additional text
In this marvelous book, Frederic Clark traces the making and reception of a forgery — a very popular and durable work by one Dares the Phrygian, which told the story of the Trojan War from the losing side. He introduces the reader to the extraordinary characters — scribes and printers, chroniclers and poets — who kept Dares' account alive for many centuries, and the scholars who came to see it as a fake. He challenges conventional ideas about the borders between forgery and fiction, and medieval and Renaissance scholarship. And he does it all in graceful, readable prose.
