Forgery

My talk outlines manuscript evidence and internal authorial references to argue against the currently dominant, unitary authorship theory for the Historia Augusta. In 1889, Hermann Dessau published a thesis arguing that the Historia Augusta was not the work of the six authors whose names appear over various of the short biographies in our extant manuscripts, but rather a single writer, masquerading as a collective (Dessau, 1889).

A peculiar rescript of Theodosius II, ostensibly dated between August 421 and August 423, claims to abrogate his decree of 14 July 421 that the patriarch of Constantinople should have jurisdiction over Illyricum, in satisfaction of a request of Honorius. This rescript, found in the Collectio Thessalonicensis (Vat. Lat. 5751), has remained a troubling piece of imperial legislation because the earlier decree remains both in the Codex Theodosianus (16.2.45) and the Codex Iustinianus (1.2.6) while the rescript abrogating it does not.

Various ancient sources make reference to a copy of Cicero’s speeches hand-made by his freedman, Tiro. The consensus of recent decades has been that this manuscript was in fact a forgery made in the second century. I argue that Tiro’s Cicero was not a single, purpose-made forgery, but rather that the name was applied to a whole series of spurious copies that arose accidentally.