When Pope Noah Ruled the Etruscans: Annius of Viterbo and his Forged Antiquities

"C. Mi sono abbatuto in un'altra [inscrittione] di molta stima, se però è vera, la qual dice il libro, che si truova in Viterbo nel palazzo del Vescovo.

"A. In esser cosa di Viterbo, subito diviene sospetta, ma come dice ella?"

Antonio Agustín ¹

In one of his short stories, Jorge Luís Borges imagines that an article describing an imaginary Middle Eastern country finds its way into certain copies of a pirated edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The investigation of this anomaly eventually leads the narrator to discover another encyclopedia,

a vast methodical fragment of an unknown planet's entire history, with its architecture and its playing cards, with the dread of its mythologies and the murmur of its languages, with its emperors and its seas, with its minerals and its birds and its fish, with its algebra and its fire, with its theological and metaphysical controversy. And all of it articulated, coherent, with no visible doctrinal intent or tone of parody. ²

This forged encyclopedia of the planet Tlön, elaborated by an entire dynasty of scholarly counterfeiters, eventually overwhelms reality as it was understood previously.

The contact and the habit of Tlön have disintegrated this world. . . . Already the schools have been invaded by the (conjectural) "primitive language" of Tlön; already the teaching of its harmonious history (filled with moving episodes) has wiped out the one which governed in my childhood; already a fictitious past occupies in our memories the place of another, a past of which we know nothing with certainty—not even that it is false.

Faced with this phenomenon, the narrator sees little hope for reality as he remembers it, and concludes gloomily that soon "the world will be Tlön." ³

While it is fantastic, such an intrusion of fiction into reality did not have to wait for Borges' imagination. A very similar forgery did in fact occur about 1500, in an age when the equivalent of such a committee's technical imagination could still be concentrated in one mind. However, the forger of this text situated his imaginary "planet" directly on earth, by presuming to reveal a European past of which his contemporaries had barely dreamed, whose contours and boundaries bore only a superficial resemblance to those they had known before. What is more, he surpassed Borges' committee in daring by harmonizing his revision of history with most of the Greek, Roman, and biblical authorities revered by his contemporaries. Annius of Viterbo has lost most of the critical notoriety that he enjoyed for two and half centuries, and is now a familiar figure only to a minority of scholars in specialized fields. ⁴ But even in the mid-eighteenth century, an eminent historian of philosophy still marveled at the success of

the daring impostor Annius of Viterbo, who foisted on the world some counterfeit documents as genuine, while demonstrating such manifest fraudulence that it is a wonder how learned men, experts in textual criticism and philology, could allow themselves to be deceived by the lies of this impostor. ⁵

In Jacob Brucker's day the success of those forgeries was indeed a blight on European intellectual history; but it was far more understandable than he might have liked to admit. Annius had revealed a European past that, like Tlön's, was both harmonious and filled with moving episodes. The fact that it was false, and transparently false to some even in Annius's time, should not have surprised the contemporaries of Voltaire. As D. C. Allen remarked, Annius had told Europeans what they wanted to hear about the past. ⁶

The question may be posed why anyone would want to read or study Annius, now that his forgeries have been exposed, now that he has no credit as a historian, and his tales have lost their willing dupes. Eugenio Garin has answered the...