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In this paper we explore the papyrus forgeries of Constantine Simonides, arguing that in making and publicizing them, he exploited the fantasy of the autograph. The illusive allure of the autograph papyrus manuscript beguiled scholars as papyri began to appear in the nineteenth century. Papyrus manuscripts promised to provide more immediate access to the ancient world in contrast to the indirect and compromised access delivered through the medieval manuscript tradition. Simonides’ forgeries took advantage of this fantasy by using the physical features of the artefact to signal the authenticity and immediacy of the autograph or authorized copy. In such a way, Simonides’ mid-nineteenth century papyrus forgeries intersect with the first publications of Greek literary papyri and the emergence of the discipline (Wasserman and Choat 2020; Choat 2019).

Simonides’ papyrus forgeries deploy features like handwriting and colophons to frame the textual content as the product of privileged and temporally proximate witness to the ancient world. The colophon appended to the Thucydides forgery aligns the copy with the family of the ancient author himself; the ending of the Periplus of Hannon allows the reader to believe they are looking upon one of the copies deposited in the library of Alexandria; the colophon to the Gospel of Matthew identifies it as the autograph manuscript; that to the Gospel of John shows it to have been copied by an apostle within the first century. Even the documentary letters he ‘discovered’ in Joseph Mayer’s Egyptian Museum in Liverpool were those of known classical authors such as Hermippus of Berytus. These attempts to frame content are reinforced by the physical features of the forgeries themselves. 

Simonides deliberately varies the handwriting he uses for his forgeries to give the impression of distinctive scribes and even, in the case of the invented letters of Hermippus and Theopompus, distinctive authorial hands. The choice to use papyrus and ostraca to bear these texts likewise reinforces the documentary authenticity of the content and thus the immediacy of access to the ancient world. The material framing of the content is designed to establish that the content is more authentic, and that we have thereby privileged access to the ancient world, and to undermine the distance of the medieval manuscript tradition and its processes of transmission. Simonides thus exploits the relationship between autograph and copy which is so difficult to trace in the body of genuine papyri (Yuen-Collingridge 2018).

We argue in this paper that the physical qualities of these papyrus forgeries appeal not simply to the expectations of the educated community at the time but beyond that to the mystique of access to autographs which the emerging discipline of papyrology promised, and that they thereby provide an instructive example which can illuminate more recent cases of forgery. These indicate that the enchantment of the idea of the manuscript as a transmitter of a more direct witness to antiquity is as alive in the present as it was in Simonides’ day.