Causes, Opportunities and Methods in the Falsifications of Roman Epigraphy in Renaissance Spain. The Case of the Tetrarchs' Inscriptions

Spain is one of the territories of the ancient Roman Empire with a higher number of false inscriptions existing only in manuscript tradition, produced between the end of the 15th century and the first half of the 16th century. This forgery includes the invention of texts using as a model the ancient literary (and epigraphic) sources available. At that time, epigraphy became an indispensable tool to justify historical realities not enough known through literary sources. In Spain this process had an essential role in the writing of historiography. The authors and the causes for this falsification are not easy to detect; on the other hand, the methods applied by the forgers can be traced with certainty through the comparison of Latin literary texts and the epigraphs already recorded in the collections of inscriptions. In this paper we will focus our attention in an important set of fakes mentioning the Tetrarchs (CIL 2, 97*, 127*, 233*, 234*, 235* and 448*), which will allow us to illustrate how forgers made use of ancient sources and to establish some hypotheses about the motives for their hoax.