The poet as a forger. Fakes and literary imitation in Roman poetry

Recent studies on pseudepigrapha have focused on forgery as an act of creative imitation, pointing to the interconnection of imitation, aemulatio and competition as crucial to our understanding of the phenomenon of literary fakes in early and late empire literature. This paper re-examines the practice of mimesis, as it is illustrated in Seneca the Younger and Quintilian, and its relationship with the notion of pseudepigraphy in Latin literature. Relying especially on Pliny the Younger’s epistles, it offers a fresh understanding of the process of reworking of poetic texts and argues that, in imitating and competing with the text of the model the poet-imitator acts as a potential forger. Manipulating the material taken from his primary source he composes texts similar, if not superior, to those of his literary antecedents and worthy of being inserted into a classical canon. Readers are invited to participate in the virtual polemical dialogue between author and his imitator, a poetic fiction designed to create a new text and, above all, a ‘new authorial persona’.