In 2013, Eric Naiman, a professor of Slavic literature at UC Berkeley, published a riveting account in the Times Literary Supplement of his unmasking of a strange literary forgery. The forgery debunked by Naiman was not a text, but rather an episode in the annals of literary history that ended up being too good to be true: an 1862 London meeting between Fyodor Dostoevsky and Charles Dickens.

In this encounter, Dickens had supposedly confided in the visiting Russian novelist that he based all his characters on the two sides of his own personality — his heroes were inspired by who he wanted to be, whereas his villains reflected who he truly was. Various Dickens scholars had repeated this appealing anecdote in the years preceding Naiman’s article, but Naiman and others were unconvinced of its authenticity.

Things got stranger as Naiman peeled back the layers of this hoax. An account of the Dickens-Dostoevsky tête-à-tête first appeared in a 2002 article by an otherwise unknown person named Stephanie Harvey. Harvey there quoted a letter of Dostoevsky’s that recounted his encounter with Dickens. According to a footnote buried in Harvey’s article, Dostoevsky’s missive was first printed in 1987 in volume 45 of the appropriately obscure Vedomosti Akademii Nauk Kazakskoi SSR or News of the Academy of Sciences of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic.

But problems soon multiplied. Naiman’s searches revealed that the journal in question did not exist, and that no similar-sounding periodical contained any transcript of this letter of Dostoevsky’s. References upon references possessed nothing whatsoever to support them.

For a complete detailing of the trickery involved (the case is far too bizarre to do it justice here), one must read Naiman’s brilliant detective story in full. But a few salient points will suffice for our purposes: it soon turned out that Stephanie Harvey was as fictitious as the fabricated Kazakh journal she cited. The meeting between two of the nineteenth century’s greatest novelists had never happened, and neither the persons nor texts that vouched for it were real. Rather, as Naiman uncovered, Stephanie Harvey was the pseudonym of one A.D. Harvey, the author of various works of British history under his real name and (among other things) a satirical Oxford campus novel under the alias Leo Bellingham.

Harvey had also created a whole cast of supporting characters out of thin air, who reviewed both his and each other’s works in various journals. To cite but one example, “Stephanie Harvey” had also authored a comparison of Bellingham’s novel with the work of Doris Lessing, which in turn cited a study of Bellingham by the nonexistent Italian scholar Ludovico Parra — published, to boot, in a nonexistent issue of the Annuario dell’Università degli Studi di Bari. With unmatched gusto, Harvey had created an elaborate interlocking web of citation and corroboration that stretched back decades.

A.D. Harvey and his multiple fictional personae were participants in a long and venerable tradition. As Anthony Grafton has shown, the history of literary forgery is almost as old as the history of literature itself. According to the early modern humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam, “there is no author who has not had something attributed to him falsely.” The older and more authoritative such authors were, the more they invited others to masquerade as them. As Erasmus pointed out, Homer — the “most ancient of the poets” — inspired numerous impostors who sought to pass off their own lines as his. This spawned a need for literary critics who could distinguish the spurious from the genuine, and so Alexandrian grammarians like Aristarchus subjected Homer’s poems to rigorous scrutiny.

But what does a twenty-first-century hoax concerning nineteenth-century literary history have to do with ancient forgeries and their reading? For one, it shows that little has changed. Venerable authors both ancient and modern have always proven vulnerable to fakery. Forgery makes use of distance, both spatial and temporal, but it also provides an irresistible means of circumventing it. Forgers sequester their fabricated sources in locales as far apart as Kazakhstan and Bari, while simultaneously pretending to peddle an unrivaled glimpse into the psyches of everyone from Dickens and Dostoevsky to Homer himself.

But the continuities between ancient and modern forgery run deeper. The webs of misattribution woven through the story of Harvey share an uncanny resemblance with stories of ancient forgeries and their undoing. Even when ancient texts play no direct role in such modern dramas, the very categories of truth and falsehood we judge them with possess distinctly ancient legacies.

The history of modern encounters with the ancient — and hence the birth of the Classics as both a discipline and an enterprise — is often told as a quest for authenticity. The humanists who played a leading role in European letters from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment — Erasmus and others included — constantly proclaimed their desire to return ad fontes, “to the sources.”

According to this well-worn model, antiquity had been obscured by latter encrustations of text — commentaries, glosses, epitomes, abridgements and the like — that rendered its original, authentic books inaccessible. These subsequent accretions did not just lack quality, but were perhaps deficient in truth as well. There was something corrupting, and potentially even false, about the many layers that separated the ancients from the moderns. Sometimes these layers were quite literally composed of forgeries, which claimed provenances far older than their due.

The study of antiquity ipso facto involved peeling back these layers and recovering the really real. Although many humanists from the Renaissance onwards imbued this story with exaggerated doses of heroism, we must not be so jaded as to dismiss it out of hand. Yet at the same time we must acknowledge that the link between ideas of antiquity and authenticity possesses a history as tangled and complex as that of Classics itself.

Consider one of the most famous episodes in this quest for the authentic, familiar even to many non-specialists. Countless surveys of Renaissance history, and many a high school and college textbook, give pride of place to the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla’s unmasking of the forged Donation of Constantine. As Valla showed, a text that claimed to date from the reign of the fourth-century emperor Constantine — and granted political power over Western Europe to the papacy — had in fact been composed far later in the Middle Ages. Valla is often venerated as both a founding father of the Renaissance and one of the first practitioners of classical philology , helping distinguish true classical Latin from its supposedly derivative and deficient successors. His denunciation of the Donation has become the locus classicus, as it were, of how to crack a forgery.

Valla accused the author of the Donation of rudeness, barbarism, boorishness, committing solecisms, mixing up Latin case endings, and the like. Yet he did not read these standards of language and culture as timeless. Rather, Valla marveled that the Donation’s impetuous forger had dared — with as much audacity as stupidity — to attribute barbarous words to an “erudite age.” For Valla, Constantine’s fourth-century world marked the last phase of erudite antiquity, which crumbled in the centuries following. For those who have read Valla’s attack as a watershed moment, the history of classical studies begins with a dual claim: that which purports to be genuine is often fake, and that which purports to be ancient is often unpalatably recent. Antiquity and truth line up with one another, as do their opposites.

There was a flip side to this heroic discourse of reclaiming authenticity — namely, a tragic narrative of antiquity as a site of irreversible loss. Those humanists who encountered the fragments of ancient sculptures, coins, and inscriptions were painfully aware of the fact that such treasures possessed few, if any, analogues in the realm of ancient books. Here they pushed up against the natural limitations of temporal distance. Although Renaissance scholars were sometimes overly optimistic about the age of the manuscripts they recovered, they were often forced to acknowledge that the earliest remaining physical copies of ancient texts were medieval exemplars, produced centuries — if not more than a millennium — after their original authors had lived.

Far more poignantly, they were aware that a multitude of ancient books had not survived what they sometimes referred to as the “injuries of time.” The awareness of loss helped fuel the vitriolic denunciation of forgeries, but it also encouraged their proliferation. For instance, just a few decades after Valla debunked the Donation, the Dominican friar Annius of Viterbo published an elaborately forged, and aptly titled, collection of Commentaries Upon Diverse Authors Discussing Antiquities. Annius wrote up extensive commentaries on hitherto unknown texts by the Babylon Berosus, the Egyptian Manetho, and the Roman Cato the Elder, among others. However, these texts were unknown for a reason: the Italian friar was both their commentator and author. Although Cato, Berosus, and their compatriots were real historical personages — just as real as a Dickens or a Dostoevsky — Annius had wholly concocted the books he ascribed to them. Moreover — as A.D. Harvey would do centuries later — he used his commentaries to create an elaborate conversation between characters of his own creation.

Anxiety and awe over the ephemerality of books were present already in antiquity. These responses have only grown more pronounced with time, from the world of Valla, Annius, and Erasmus up to now. Barring the kind of luck that preserves papyri in conveniently deoxygenated environments, when it comes to ancient texts we must make do with secondhand witnesses — and thus grapple with inevitable problems of loss and distortion.

Ancient authors provide arresting images of both the power and porousness of physical books. Augustine — who in Book VIII of his Confessions famously recounted his conversion to Christianity after being told tolle lege or “pick up and read” the Bible — waxed poetic about how a copy of Aristotle’s Categories, which he had long heard of but hadn’t yet located, finally “fell into my hands.” He stood in awe at its very title, as “something great and divine.”

Augustine also affirmed just how easy (and perhaps convenient) it was to lose a book for good — particularly in a world where texts were fragile and writing laborious. In Book IV of his Confessions, he mentioned that before his conversion he had written several volumes on aesthetics, titled On the Beautiful and the Fitting, which he now disavowed. But he could no longer locate them. Indeed, neither can we, and they have joined the crowded ranks of ancient texts forever lost. “They have escaped my memory,” Augustine declared, “Somehow they have been mislaid.”

One of his near contemporaries, the fourth-century sophist Libanius, offered a similar vignette concerning bookish loss. He had possessed a cherished copy of Thucydides written in a script “so fine and small” that he could transport it to his lectures without difficulty. Yet someone stole the book from him, and thereafter he lamented that he could not derive the same pleasure from reading Thucydides in any other copy. Thankfully, the story had a happy ending: a student of Libanius’ found it on sale in the market, and soon Libanius embraced his Thucydides again, just like a “lost child.”

These responses permeate forgeries just as much as they do genuine books. A sense of the miraculous surmounting of scarcity and rarity reverberates throughout ancient fakes and frauds. Consider the history of the Trojan War supposedly written by one Dares the Phrygian. Dares claimed to have been an eyewitness to the events of Troy — a partisan of the Trojan side who had recorded it all in his war journal. Unlike Homer, he claimed to have seen Odysseus, Aeneas, Priam, Agamemnon, and other heroes in the flesh. By that authority, he knew Aeneas was not only eloquent and charming, but also “auburn-haired” and “stocky.” Nestor was not only a “sage councilor,” but also possessed a “long hooked nose.”

Dares wrote up the war in dry, bare-bones prose; rejecting poetic flourishes, he promised to deliver the facts and just the facts. His battlefield reports included precise casualty figures, and the squabbling gods of Homer’s Iliad were wholly absent from his dispatches. Details abounded: at the conclusion of his account, the Phrygian “eyewitness” tabulated his daily records and calculated with confident precision that the war took ten years, six months, and twelve days, and that during this interval 886,000 Greeks and 676,000 Trojans perished.

Though Dares supposedly wrote in Greek, his text circulated in Latin. But even this incongruity possessed an explanation — found in a letter that told the story of the text’s dramatic discovery. Dares’ history began with a prefatory epistle written by its supposed “translator” — none other than the Augustan-era biographer Cornelius Nepos — and addressed to the Roman historian Sallust.

Of course, just as Dares’ history was a fake, so the real Nepos and the real Sallust had never set eyes upon the book. Yet this spurious epistle did its best to make the book’s discovery convincing. “Nepos” wrote to “Sallust” with some exciting news. He had been in Athens, and had happened upon the Phrygian’s hitherto lost book in an Athenian archive. Dares had written it, Nepos labored to point out, in his own hand. Here was a tangible relic of a distant past already considered ancient in the first century BCE. Nepos then explained to Sallust that he had translated the book “literally” or ad verbum from its original Greek into Latin, neither adding nor subtracting anything lest it seem his own and not Dares’ work. Vouching for Dares’ superior authenticity, he declared that Dares “lived and fought at that time when Greeks fought Trojans,” whereas Homer “was born many years after the war had been waged.”

This little forged book, which fooled many a learned scholar throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, operated according to some classic protocols of fakery. It claimed association with real and venerable authors like Sallust and Cornelius Nepos. It presented both its author and its translator as decidedly passive agents: Dares only wrote what he saw, and Nepos only translated what he read. Finally, it played with that paradoxical connection between closeness and distance. It offered direct, unmediated access to a distant Trojan past, but it simultaneously sequestered proof of this past in an obscure Athenian archive.

Nor was Dares alone in this game. To cite but one other example, Dares was often read alongside another supposedly eyewitness account of the Trojan War. This history claimed as its author one Dictys of Crete, a participant in the war on the Greek side. Dictys’ history also contained a preface, featuring a tale of bookish discovery that made Nepos’ Athenian sojourn seem dull by comparison. As it explained, during the reign of Nero there was an earthquake at Knossos in Crete. When the ground shook, Dictys’ hitherto unknown book surfaced amid the ruins of his tomb, revealing a box housing the text he had written “on linden tablets and in Phoenician letters.” Amazed, the Cretans then sent the book to Nero himself. Ecce liber, indeed.

The ironies inherent in these fictive accounts of lost books found again remain with us today, not least in the multiple meanings derived from the Latin term inventio. For these are tales of invention in our sense of fabrication — the opposite of antiquity as authentic — but they also quite literally reflect the original sense of inventio as an act of “finding.” To find and to fabricate are conveniently elided, but they also reflect a fundamentally similar process. Whether the books in question were real and forged, they offered a means of filling the inevitable gaps in the ancient record, and bringing some part of a distant antiquity back to life through would-be physical survivals.

A particularly wry reminder that the paradoxes of inventio are still very much alive can be found in no less exalted a publication than The Onion, that cheeky barometer of cultural anxiety. One of its most popular pieces remains its 2010 breaking news alert, “Historians Admit to Inventing Ancient Greeks.” Poking fun at the mechanisms of canon-formation, and our continued desire to ascribe venerable ancient origins to diverse aspects of modern culture, the article details the startling admission by a group of eminent historians that they had fabricated all of ancient Greek civilization, from Homer and Aristotle to Euclidean geometry and Athenian democracy. According to the report, “The group acknowledged that the idea of a sophisticated, flourishing society existing in Greece more than two millennia ago was a complete fiction created by a team of some two dozen historians, anthropologists, and classicists who worked nonstop between 1971 and 1974 to forge ‘Greek’ documents and artifacts.”

Much like Harvey’s Dickens and Dostoevsky, this satirical claim was hardly without precedent. In the late seventeenth century, albeit with dire earnestness instead of irony, the French Jesuit scholar Jean Hardouin declared almost the entire extant corpus of ancient Greco-Roman texts to be forgeries, with the exception of Cicero, Pliny’s Natural History, Virgil’s Georgics, and a few other lucky survivors. Whereas The Onion attributed its plot to scholars at the Smithsonian and identified one of its ringleaders as Professor Gene Haddlebury, “chair of Hellenic Studies at Georgetown University,” Hardouin blamed the faking of antiquity upon a devious cabal of fourteenth-century monks led by one Severus Archontius.

While Hardouin’s theory might seem reminiscent of Onion-like hilarity, or at least as baffling as the kind of credulity that attributed the rediscovery of a lost Trojan history to seismic shocks in Crete, many seventeenth-century scholars rejected it with the same degree of seriousness with which the Jesuit proposed it. As strange as it may seem, Hardouin’s denunciation of all antiquity represented Valla’s and Erasmus’ quest for ancient authenticity taken to its logical extreme. And that fear — that we will never be able to recover true antiquity correctly and completely, even as we have invested so much in genealogies that link it to modernity — continues to haunt present-day classicists with equal ferocity.

Whether ancient or modern, the history of forgery is tragicomic: it reveals that criticism has never strayed far from error, that heroic recoveries are always darkened by the specter of textual loss, and that many have indulged remarkable flights of fancy to surmount such difficulties and fill in literature’s inevitable gaps. Second, it shows just how much our ideas of the genuine and the spurious are tied to physical, material books and documents — and their inventions in all senses of the word. Finally, and most importantly, while “antiquity” is always a moving chronological target, forgery reminds us that authenticity and its attendant anxieties are concepts inherent in the very notion of the ancient — whether expressed in the Greco-Roman world, Renaissance Europe, or today.

Frederic Clark is Visiting Assistant Professor at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at NYU. He received his PhD from Princeton in 2014, and his research examines the cultural and intellectual history of medieval and early modern Europe, with particular focus on how Greco-Roman antiquity was received and appropriated from the early Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. He is currently writing a book on the afterlife of Dares the Phrygian’s forged Trojan history.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Paideia Institute.