The First Pagan Historian: The Fortunes of a Fraud from Antiquity to the Enlightenment (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780190492304)

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.

Author: Frederic Clark
ISBN-10: 0190492309
ISBN-13: 9780190492304
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Language: English
Published: 10/14/2020
Pages: 366
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.05lbs
Size: 9.20h x 6.00w x 0.70d