The Perennial Quarrel

The Conclusion begins by bringing the story of Dares up to the decades around 1700. It considers both changes and continuities in Dares’ afterlife over the course of the preceding millennium. It then examines the neglected role of the Destruction of Troy in two developments long linked to the eighteenth century: namely, the origins of modern professionalized classical scholarship and the advent of a sense of “disenchantment” concerning the truth-value of ancient texts and traditions. It places Dares within the so-called “quarrel of the ancients and the moderns” (querelle des anciens et des modernes) and examines the commentary on the Destruction of Troy composed by the French classical scholar Anne Dacier (a partisan of the “ancients” who later defended Homer against “modern” critiques). It also discusses invocations of Dares by figures including Jean Mabillon, Giambattista Vico, and Thomas Jefferson. The Conclusion ends with broader reflections on what Dares’ reception history can tell us about the paradoxes inherent in modern approaches to antiquity.

Dares Survives

Chapter 6 moves both forward in time and outward in scope. It traces Dares’ afterlife well into the seventeenth century, and in doing so it moves beyond treatments of the text in isolation. Instead, it examines the afterlives of Dares’ “fellow travelers”—i.e., texts that circulated with him either in manuscripts, printed editions, or even the minds of critics—and reconstructs how together they wove webs of error and confusion that kept Dares alive for longer than we might think possible. These textual companions included such diverse sources as Joseph of Exeter, Dictys, (pseudo)-Pindar, and even Homer himself. As this chapter suggests, the legacy of medieval manuscript culture—and its many unintended consequences—was felt long into the early modern period. The second half of the chapter discusses the role that Dares, along with Dictys, played in debates over the historicity of the distant Trojan past, in an age marked by newfound historical skepticism.

Dares Printed and Philologized

Chapter 5 looks in closer depth at just why Dares remained a source of debate in early modern Europe, even after some critics had seemingly demolished him once and for all. The first part of the chapter examines phenomena traditionally associated with the rise of criticism and the downfall of forgeries, including print culture, the recuperation of ancient Greek texts, and scientific empiricism. It argues that these phenomena actually bolstered the reputation and credibility of Dares Phrygius. From the Elizabethan Philip Sidney’s neo-Aristotelian poetics to the proliferation of printed reference works by Conrad Gessner, Jean Bodin, and others, Dares remained a canonical first in the history of history. The second part of the chapter examines how, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, both the increasingly professionalized world of classical scholarship and the confessional polemics engendered by the Reformation and Counter–Reformation responded to this perpetuation of Dares’ longevity with renewed attacks.

Dares Compiled

Chapter 2 surveys the transmission and reception of the Destruction of Troy in the Middle Ages, from the earliest attestations of the text in Carolingian Francia to the height of its popularity in twelfth-century England. Specifically, it examines how medieval scribes and compilers packaged the text in multi-text manuscripts, which survive today in great numbers. Many of these codices continued Dares with accounts of the Trojan origins of the Franks, Britons, and other medieval peoples. In this fashion the Destruction of Troy morphed from an ancient history into a medieval genealogy—it functioned as a means of linking the medieval present to the ancient past through claims of Trojan ancestry. The latter portions of the chapter explore Dares’ many connections with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, a twelfth-century pseudo-history that famously claimed Britain had been founded by the Trojan Brutus.

Introduction

The Introduction opens with broad reflections on the place of forgery, criticism, and debates over textual authenticity in the reception of Greco-Roman antiquity, whether in Renaissance Europe or today. It surveys recent literature on forgery and antiquity and also discusses the ongoing presence of moralizing language and polemic in works of ostensible dispassionate criticism. It then introduces readers to the text at the center of this book—Dares Phrygius’ De excidio Troiae historia or History of the Destruction of Troy—and discusses antecedents for works of this nature in the Second Sophistic. Thereafter, it examines Dares’ ambiguous place at the intersection of history, myth, and literary fiction, arguing that modern means of distinguishing among these concepts (such as the Weberian theory of “disenchantment”) are unable to explain the motivations of both Dares’ critics and believers. The remainder of the Introduction discusses issues of method, situating The First Pagan Historian within current trends in intellectual history, book history, and classical reception studies.

Dares Attacked

Chapter 4 begins in the early Italian Renaissance with the Florentine humanist Coluccio Salutati, one of the first scholars to suggest that Dares was perhaps not who he said he was. After considering the contributions of figures like Lorenzo Valla and Erasmus to the history of criticism, it surveys how debates over Dares’ authenticity spread across early modern scholarship. In the sixteenth century, the forged Antiquities of a modern trickster, the Dominican Annius of Viterbo, prompted some critics to attack not only Annius’ own works, but also the “ancient” texts of Dares and Dictys Cretensis. Suddenly it became possible to doubt the first pagan historian. Yet even as a growing number of early modern scholars attacked Dares’ credibility, others blithely went on believing him. As this chapter argues, this simultaneous rejection and affirmation of Dares reflected the continued valorization of ancient authority in early modern scholarship, and its newfound concern for forming a classical canon.

Dares Translated

Chapter 3 turns to Dares’ place in complex medieval debates over the relative merits of history and fiction. Focusing on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it begins by discussing readings of the Destruction of Troy as moral exemplum and then examines how Dares sheds new light on an oft-discussed topic in the medieval reception of antiquity: i.e., allegory. From allegory and exemplarity it moves to poetry, exploring how sources including the Old French Roman de Troie of Benoît de Sainte-Maure, the Iliad of Joseph of Exeter, and the Troilus of Albert von Stade appropriated the supposed truth of the first pagan historian and then translated it into verse. In particular, it reconstructs how medieval poets who claimed to follow Dares engaged in both imitation of—and polemic against—ancient poets like Virgil. This chapter closes with considerations of Dares’ role in later medieval literature, including his use by figures like Guido delle Colonne, Petrarch, and Chaucer.

Dares Forged

Chapter 1 begins with an examination of the early medieval encyclopedist Isidore of Seville, who christened Dares Phrygius the first pagan historian. It then moves back in time to consider the likely origins of the Destruction of Troy, and how those in both its supposed and actual milieux of composition (i.e., classical Rome of the first century BCE and late antiquity) defined the nature of history (historia) and distinguished history from fiction or fabula. It also discusses authors whom Dares co-opted, such as the ostensible translator of his text, the Roman historian and biographer Cornelius Nepos, and those whom he challenged (via claims of Aeneas’ treachery), such as the poet Virgil. Finally, it examines numerous attempts—by everyone from Hellenistic chronologers and Nepos himself to early Christian scholars like Eusebius and Jerome—to date the Trojan War and incorporate it into universal history. It argues that both the primacy assigned to autoptic history and the world historical significance assigned to Troy played signal roles in Dares’ afterlife.