Even legitimate-seeming scholars produced fraudulent works for sale to the library. Posing as an Athenian contemporary and confidant of Thucydides, the scholar Cratippus wrote Everything Thucydides Left Unsaid, “in which he made happy use of bombast and anachronism.” The book found its way into the collection, where it was treated as a legitimate text. Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Plutarch both took the manuscript seriously. This style of work, parasitically piggy-backing on the reputation of a valued author, would become a staple of fraudulent publishing in the early-modern era and well
...more
