Le conseguenze dell'errore

Through the analysis of two case studies, this article discusses the consequences that wrong or false attributions of ancient works have had on their fortunes and on modern scholarship. The first concerns the false attribution to Cicero of the Rhetorica ad Herennium, which can be dated to the years between the end of the 1st century A.D. (Quintilian) and the end of the 2nd (Flavius Caper); the text’s subsequent fortune was due to this false attribution, which was questioned only in the Humanistic age. The second case concerns two pseudepigraphic works that manuscripts attribute to Caper but are instead late compilations. Keil’s ambiguity in dealing with them resulted in their attribution, in many linguistic studies, to an older age of linguistic phenomena that are instead datable to the later period in which the two compilations were done.