ABSTRACT
This chapter establishes that the elegy ‘Non fuit Arsacidum tanti expugnare Seleucen’ and the accompanying fragments were forged by Didacus Pyrrhus Lusitanus (Diogo Pires; Jacobus Flavius Eborensis). The argument rests on comparison with his other poetic works, external evidence relating to the circumstances surrounding the ‘discovery’ of the poems, and evidence from their publication history. Didacus, an accomplished writer of Latin elegies in the manner of Tibullus and Propertius, had an idea of Cornelius Gallus that depended on a conflation of Maximianus-Gallus with the ‘Gallus’ of Lydia bella puella candida; he reproduced numerous formulations from his own neo-Latin poetry in the forged text. The argument sets the forgery in the context of other ancient fakes done by Renaissance humanists, including Marc-Antoine Muret’s forgery of lines by Trabea and Accius (which fooled Joseph Scaliger), and the spurious lines attributed to Cassius Parmensis by Achilles Statius, the first target of Didacus’s imposture.
