The First Pagan Historian The Fortunes of a Fraud from Antiquity to the Enlightenment

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.

Frederic Clark is a cultural and intellectual historian who specializes in the afterlife of classical antiquity in medieval and early modern Europe. His research examines how the reception of the ancient past informed-and continues to inform-practices of humanistic scholarship. He is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Southern California.

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