COLLAPSE - Collaboration and Pseudepigraphy. Facing the Anonymous in Imperial Greek Literature

ERC Strating Grant - Markus Hafner (2025-2028)

In Classical Philology, a discipline which has long relied on the figure of the author, authorless texts are an ‘elephant in the room’. In antiquity, however, long before the introduction of copyright, texts were the universal commons of all those who drew on them. Authorship was frequently faked, forged, or anonymized. Because authorless texts resist the author-based gravitational structure of literary history, they continue to pose a challenge to scholars in the field and have often been marginalized.

COLLAPSE tackles this problem by providing a new methodological basis for situating authorless texts in Greek studies. Imperial Greek literature in particular serves as a fertile ground to re-think (an)onymized text production.

COLLAPSE aims
(1) to reinterpret the forms of (an)onymization as forms of ‘fan fiction’ or as attempts to ‘rewrite’
previous authors;
(2) to analyze how boundaries between model authors and their subsequent ‘imitators’ collapsed in
Greek literature;
(3) to explore the relation between poems that were ascribed to alleged authors and unattributed
texts, thus differentiating forms, functions, and contexts of (an)onymization;
(4) to develop a non-normative terminology and classificatory system that moves authorless texts from
various fields to the center of Greek literary history.

Three of COLLAPSE’s work packages investigate the centripetal power of the author’s name in the attribution of Greek texts. The other three analyze the dynamics of anonymization and examine the centrifugal forces of anonymity.

COLLAPSE attempts to subvert the classificatory binary of genuine and authentic texts versus ‘forgeries’. Moreover, the inclusion of different fields of knowledge aims to break down theoretical boundaries to neighboring disciplines. Overall, COLLAPSE will rethink the processes of (an)onymization in a groundbreaking way and contribute to a better understanding of inter-authorial mechanisms in Imperial Greek textual production.