Abstract

My inverted commas are intended; I mean, of whom are Schwartz and Jacoby thinking when they say that the History which was called Kratippos' was a forgery of the second or of the first century B.C. ? The reason for the question is this: most forgeries are of the form, ‘Here is an epigram by Simonides, a new chapter by Thucydides’; or ‘I, a humble scholar or an unknown person, X, have discovered the lost books of Livy, or a hitherto unknown painting by Vermeer, or a privately printed edition of Sonnets from the Portuguese’; that is, the work forged is said to be by a famous person, the discoverer a relatively obscure one. Schwartz and Jacoby, however, say, or imply, that ‘Kratippos’ was the name of the forger, a man who lived, probably, in the first century B.C., and who deceived Dionysios of Halikarnassos and Plutarch ; but what did he assert that his history was ? Did he say, ‘I, Kratippos, have discovered a lost history dating from a generation after the end of the Peloponnesian war which is a continuation of Thucydides; authorship unknown’? Clearly not, for Dionysios says, and Plutarch quite plainly implies, that they took ‘Kratippos’ to be an author of the early fourth century