icion that they are themselves the impostors, the difficulty of
assigning a motive only increases that of forming a decision; to adopt
or reject them may be equally dangerous.

In this class we must place Annius of Viterbo,[214] who published a
pretended collection of historians of the remotest antiquity, some of
whose _names_ had descended to us in the works of ancient writers, while
their works themselves had been lost. Afterwards he subjoined
commentaries to confirm their authority by passages from known authors.
These at first were eagerly accepted by the learned; the blunders of the
presumed editor, one of which was his mistaking the right name of the
historian he forged, were gradually detected, till at length the
imposture was apparent! The pretended originals were more remarkable for
their number than their volume; for the whole collection does not exceed
171 pages, which lessened the difficulty of the forgery; while the
commentaries which were afterwards published must have been manufactured
at the same time as the text. In favour of Annius, the high rank he
occupied at the Roman Court, his irreproachable conduct, and his
declaration that he had recovered some of these fragments at Mantua, and
that others had come from Armenia, induced many to credit these
pseudo-historians. A literary war soon kindled; Niceron has
discriminated between four parties engaged in this conflict. One party
decried the whole of the collection as gross forgeries; another
obstinately supported their authenticity; a third decided that they were
forgeries before Annius possessed them, who was only credulous; while a
fourth party considered them as partly authentic, and ascribed their
blunders to the interpolations of the editor, to increase their
importance. Such as they were, they scattered confusion over the whole
face of history. The false Berosus opens his history before the deluge,
when, according to him, the Chaldeans through preceding ages had
faithfully preserved their historical evidences! Annius hints, in his
commentary, at the archives and public libraries of the Babylonians: the
days of Noah comparatively seemed modern history with this dreaming
editor. Some of the fanciful writers of Italy were duped: Sansovino, to
delight the Florentine nobility, accommodated them with a new title of
antiquity in their ancestor Noah, _Imperatore e monarcha delle genti,
visse e mori in quelle parti._ The Spaniards complained that in forging