This volume explores the themes of authorship and authenticity – and connected issues – from the Classical Antiquity to the Renaissance. Its reflection is constructed within a threefold framework. A first section includes topics dealing with dubious or uncertain attribution of ancient works, homonymous writers, and problems regarding the reliability of compilation literature. The middle section goes through several issues concerning authorship: the balance between the author’s contribution to their own work and the role of collaborators, pupils, circles, reviewers, scribes, and even older sources, but also the influence of different compositional stages on the concept of ‘author’, and the challenges presented by anonymous texts. Finally, a third crucial section on authenticity and forgeries concludes the book: it contains contributions dealing with spurious works – or sections of works – , mechanisms of interpolation, misattribution, and deliberate forgery. The aim of the book is therefore to exemplify the many nuances of the complex problems of authenticity and authorship of ancient texts.

thersites is an international open access journal for innovative transdisciplinary classical studies edited by Annemarie Ambühl, Filippo Carlà-Uhink, Christian Rollinger and Christine Walde. thersites expands classical reception studies by publishing original scholarship free of charge and by reflecting on Greco-Roman antiquity as present phenomenon and diachronic culture that is part of today’s transcultural and highly diverse world. Antiquity, in our understanding, does not merely belong to the past, but is always experienced and engaged in the present. thersites contributes to the critical review on methods, theories, approaches and subjects in classical scholarship, which currently seems to be awkwardly divided between traditional perspectives and cultural turns. thersites brings together scholars, writers, essayists, artists and all kinds of agents in the culture industry to get a better understanding of how antiquity constitutes a part of today’s culture and (trans-)forms our present. thersites appears twice yearly and publishes regular issues as well as specially-themed and guest-edited issues focused on individual subjects and questions. Call for papers are released regularly and long in advance on our homepage (https://thersites-journal.de/) and on other pages that feature announcements for classical studies (APA, Mommsen-Gesellschaft etc.).

This volume explores the themes of authorship and authenticity – and connected issues – from the Classical Antiquity to the Renaissance. Its reflection is constructed within a threefold framework. A first section includes topics dealing with dubious or uncertain attribution of ancient works, homonymous writers, and problems regarding the reliability of compilation literature. The middle section goes through several issues concerning authorship: the balance between the author’s contribution to their own work and the role of collaborators, pupils, circles, reviewers, scribes, and even older sources, but also the influence of different compositional stages on the concept of ‘author’, and the challenges presented by anonymous texts. Finally, a third crucial section on authenticity and forgeries concludes the book: it contains contributions dealing with spurious works – or sections of works – , mechanisms of interpolation, misattribution, and deliberate forgery. The aim of the book is therefore to exemplify the many nuances of the complex problems of authenticity and authorship of ancient texts.

Building on Calvino’s observations on Exactitude in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, the present book elucidates on the possible definitions of exactitude, the endeavor of reaching exactitude, and the undeniable limits to the achievement of this ambitious milestone. The eighteen essays in this interdisciplinary volume show how ancient and medieval authors have been dealing with the problem of exactitude vs. inexactitude and have been able to exploit the ambiguities related to these two concepts to various ends. The articles focus on rhetoric and historiography (section I), exact sciences and technical disciplines (II), the peculiarity of quotations (III), cases of programmatic inexactitude (IV) and textual transmission (V). Several interconnected questions weave a net across the volume: to what extent is exactitude the goal in ancient and medieval texts? How can the concepts of accuracy and inaccuracy aid the reinterpretation of an already known text or fact? To what extent can certain definitions of exactitude be stretched, without turning into inexactitude? The volume presents an extensive study capable of highlighting the shrewdness and aptness of the concepts introduced by Calvino more than thirty years ago.

This book, the first ever biography of the father of philosophy, tracks Plato's life from his childhood in war-torn Athens at the end of the fifth century BCE to his founding of the Academy, adventures in Sicily, death, and immense legacy. Throughout, it sheds light on Plato's many timeless works of philosophy.

Chance, in addition to the unavoidable ambiguity caused by time, is one of the main guilty parties in the transmission of ancient texts – or lack thereof. However, the same cannot be said for what concerns the mechanisms of selection and loss of historical and literary memory, where the voluntary awareness of obscuring is often part of a precise aim, thus leading the cultural memory of a literate society to become fragmented. The present volume explores the devices and criteria of selection and loss in Ancient and Medieval texts and the subsequent fragmentation of such literature, but it also addresses the questions of the damnatio memoriae, of literary strategies such as reticence and omission, as well as of known texts deemed lost but re-found thanks to state-of-the-art methods in digitization. The many and diverse nuances of the concepts of omission, selection, and loss throughout Ancient and Medieval literature and history are illustrated through a number of case studies in the four sections of this volume, each examining a different facet of the topic: ‘Mechanisms and criteria of textual loss and selection’, ‘Lost texts re-discovered’, ‘Voluntary omissions and desire for oblivion’, and ‘Re-working the known’.