Read Online Forged by Bart D. Ehrman - Free Book Online Page B

author agrees to stick to the historical facts insofar as she can, and readers expect her to do so. Any breach of this contract is seen as a violation of the rules and is condemned.
    In ancient historical writing the matter was a bit more complicated. In large part that was because in antiquity there simply weren’t the research tools available that we have today: extensive access to reliable sources, copious written records, databases, data retrieval systems, the possibilities given us by mass media and electronic modes of communication. Ancient historians had to do their best to cobble together a plausible narrative of past events. It was very hard indeed to give an “accurate” account, though most historians tried. Nowhere was this more obviously a problem than in recording the actual words of someone who lived a long time ago. Some of the best histories from antiquity are chock full of speeches given by their main characters. But if the events took place decades or even centuries earlier, in an age before there were tape recorders, or even stenographers and same-day reporting, how was a historian to know what the character actually said? There was, in fact, no way to know.
    For that reason, a superb historian such as the fifth-century BCE Thucydides explicitly states that he simply made up the speeches himself. What choice did ancient historians have? The best they could do was to invent a speech that seemed appropriate to the character of the speaker and the occasion and trust that it was a more or less close approximation of what was actually said. There was no way of showing whether the historian got it right. But educated readers realized that this is what the historians were doing, and so here again there was a kind of understood contract between author and readers; the author would come up with his best guess at what a speaker said and readers would accept it for what it was, a best guess.
    Some scholars have thought that forgery was like that, a kind of fiction comparable to the invention of speeches in a history, in which the real author and the real readers agreed not to take seriously the false name attached to a writing. As I have shown, recent scholars who have actually studied the ancient discussions of forgery indicate that this view is not right at all. Forgeries were literary texts in which the author adopted a kind of fiction without the permission of readers. And readers, when they found out, did not appreciate it. Ancient people treated forged historical narratives, treatises, letters, and so on as “false writings” and “lies,” not as some kind of harmless and innocent fiction. That is why the ancients were so interested in seeing whether books were “authentic children” of their named authors or “illegitimate” ( notha ), not really belonging to the person named as the author.
    So too ancient people recognized the difference between fabricated fictional accounts and historical narratives. Some historians, such as Lucian of Samosata and Polybius, unlike Thucydides, were quite insistent that historical narratives should indicate only what actually happened. Historians should not make up stories or even the speeches delivered by the characters in their histories. As Polybius, a second-century BCE Greek historian who wrote about Rome’s rise to power, succinctly states it: the historian should “simply record what really happened and what really was said.” For Polybius, the historian is different from the “tragic poet” (i.e., the author of fictional drama): “The tragic poet should thrill and charm his audience for the moment by the verisimilitude of the words he puts into his characters’ mouths, but it is the task of the historian to instruct and convince for all time serious students by the truth of the facts and the speeches he narrates.” 5
    The reason a historian such as Polybius had to argue this point so