E scholio in lapidem. Recreaciones humanísticas epigráficas de un pasaje de Juvenal (sch. 6, 638)

Juvenal’s mention of the child killer Pontia, who (according to the scholiast) poisoned her two children before killing herself, aroused the imagination of some 15th-century Italian humanist, who made up an epitaph for her. Half a century later, the inscription’s theme inspired again another forger, who used the text to create another funerary inscription, supposedly found in Talavera la Vieja. At the end of the century, the Spanish text was altered one last time by the famous author of a series of false chronicles, Jerónimo Román de la Higuera. The reconstruction of this exceptional chain of reused literary and epigraphic sources allows us to better understand the methods employed by the first epigraphists during the 15th and 16th centuries, and it sheds light on the interests and motivations which moved the minds of the forgers.