Talk:Life of Homer (Pseudo-Herodotus)

Crypto-Dalby

Hello Dalby. Your status as an author and scholar in the field presents certain problems with Wikipedia policy. You chose to work on Wikipedia and I am glad you did and also I agree with your reasons totally. I am sure you are finding as have I this is an experience unparalled elsewhere. I am sure there are many unidentified authors on it too and from what I can see they sure need this experience.

Now, Wikipedia is not for publication of original research! So if you say something opinionated here without a ref it can immediately be called into question. If you say it in your own book(s) then no one can question it except your peers in a peer review of articles and books. And on Wikipedia we can say, "well, Dalby says ...." But if Dalby says it here then Dalby has to back it up and be scutinized by the general public and subject to merciless editing just like everyone else, and that is part of the Wikipedia experience which is so useful though painful. No pain no gain. I suppose you can back up Dalby online with Dalby offline.

What I am getting to in this roundabout way is that your point of view on Pseudo-Herodotus is not shared by everyone substantial. So, arbitrary unreferenced statements about the way things certainly are, are not for us at our level. I think not many people care to take on an identified author. Maybe fools step in where angels fear to tread. In any case I am changing your point of view to one I think is more balanced and I hope you will not take it amiss. Thanks.Dave (talk) 14:00, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

PS I think your sales would do better if you made yourself reviewable on Google Books. It certainly would be more convenient for us, but I have to say, if there is anything here or in Homer or other articles to which you have contributed that looks like salesmanship I will have to take it out.Dave (talk) 12:04, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, I hadn't seen this till now -- I wasn't watching the page. I don't know why it's headed "Crypto-Dalby": I write under my own name, there's nothing hidden. Any editor who fails to take a neutral point of view is, of course, going to be corrected by others. That's what makes Wikipedia what it is.

As regards that last-but-one point, it's generally a decision for the publisher, not the author, whether to make a current book searchable on Google Books or not. I guess some publishers think it helps sales, some think it kills sales. And I can see what they mean. I often use Google Books for current publications. If it didn't exist, I would need either to buy the books or to persuade a library to buy them. Andrew Dalby 11:41, 7 August 2010 (UTC)

AD 3rd-4th century

Life of Homer (Pseudo-Herodotus) was from AD 3rd-4th century... I have this book(Turkish version) and I wrote that as a note on it. (but now, I don't know where I found it...)& I want to read it on Wikisource! Böri (talk) 07:59, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

Yes. I doubt whether that dating can be proved, though when writing Rediscovering Homer I accepted it as fairly certain. I note that Mary Lefkowitz implies a 3rd-4th century AD dating by showing that at this period "an audience for learned fraud existed and could be exploited" (Lives of the Greek Poets, pp. 19-20). She cites several similar literary forgeries written at about this period. Since so many other quotations are already on the page, I think it's time to quote Mary Lefkowitz too ... Andrew Dalby 09:05, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

In fact, having checked back through the history, I see that in originally drafting this article I did cite Mary Lefkowitz on the dating issue, as follows:

• The text was written long after Herodotus's time, perhaps in the third or fourth centuries AD, when there was apparently an audience for literary pastiches, such as the Letters of Alciphron, and fraudulent attributions, as in the Historia Augusta. (Lefkowitz, 1981, p. 20)

This was lost in later rewriting by others. I guess literary scholarship like Lefkowitz's is out, these days, and "epistemological interpretations" are in. Hence although the Latin page still suggests this dating, the English one has become timeless.

If I read correctly, the Hungarian page suggests "2nd century AD". I don't know the basis for that. Andrew Dalby 09:24, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

Thank you. Anyway, it's an ancient book! I want to see the English translation of it on Wikisource... Böri (talk) 10:05, 3 November 2010 (UTC)