Free Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics by Bart D. Ehrman Page B

Polybius.
Falsifications
    Even more closely related to the phenomenon of forgery is the practice of falsifying a text. When an author forges a writing, claiming to be someone other than who she is, she asserts that her words are those of another. So too a copyist who alters a text by adding a few words, or by interpolating entire passages, or by rewriting the text in other ways, is making the implicit claim that his own words—the ones he has interpolated or generated himself—are the words of the author of the (rest of the) text.
    Textual alteration was widely discussed in antiquity, and just as widely condemned. Our earliest reference appears to be in Herodotus, who mentions a collector of oracles named Onomacritus, friend and counselor of the tyrant Pisistratus, who earlier in his life had been discovered to have inserted an oracle of his own into the verses of Musaeus, to the effect that the islands off Lemnos would disappear under water. Lasus of Hermione, a poet and musician who was Pindar’s teacher, evidently suspected Onomacritus of making the interpolation and reported it to Hipparchus, who promptly banished Onomacritus from Athens. 76
    Onomacritus had a wide reputation for interpolating oracles into the alleged writings of Musaeus. Pausanias, for example, gives another instance: “I have read a poem in which Mousaios was able to fly, by the gift of the North-east wind; I think Onomakritos wrote it; nothing of Mousaios exists for certain except the
Hymn to Demeter
.” 77 And Plutarch as well: “I forbear to mention how much blame men like Onomacritus, Prodicus, and Cinaethon have brought upon themselves from the oracles by foisting upon them a tragic diction and a grandiloquence of which they have had no need, nor have I any kindly feeling toward their changes.” 78 Even the Christian Clement recounts the by then traditional view: “Onomacritus of Athens,the reputed author of the poems attributed to Orpheus, is to be found in the reign of the Pisistratides
circa
the fiftieth Olympiad” (
Stromateis 1.21
). 79
    Strabo reports on an earlier Athenian textual alteration, this time in Homer’s Iliad. In this case the falsification, made either by Pisistratus or Solon, had clear political implications, as it supported the Athenians’ claim to the island of Salamis:
    At the present time the island is held by the Athenians, although in early times there was strife between them and the Megarians for its possession. Some say that it was Peisistratus, others Solon, who inserted in the
Catalogue of Ships
immediately after the verse, “and Aias brought twelve ships from Salamis,” [Iliad 2, 557] the verse, “and, bringing them, halted them where the battalions of the Athenians were stationed,” and then used the poet as a witness that the island had belonged to the Athenians from the beginning. But the critics do not accept this interpretation, because many of the verses bear witness to the contrary. 80
    Sometimes writings were falsified for philosophical rather than political reasons. Diogenes Laertius, for example, reports that the librarian of Pergamum, the Stoic Athenodorus, was condemned at trial for falsifying Stoic writings by deleting problematic passages from Zeno, founder of the sect:
    Isidorus likewise affirms that the passages disapproved by the [Stoic] school were expunged from his [Zeno’s] works by Athenodorus the Stoic, who was in charge of the Pergameme library; and that afterwards, when Athenodorus was detected and compromisedthey were replaced. So much concerning the passages in his writings which are regarded as spurious(
Lives
, 7.34)
    The falsification of texts of Homer, of course, generated early classical scholarship, especially as associated with the library in Alexandria. 81
    Falsification of texts was also a matter hotly contested within Christian circles of the first four centuries. Heretics were roundly and widely condemned for altering the texts of Scripture in light of their own