Forgeries and philology the subject of Montreal conference

(AGI) Montreal, July 20 - In connection with the "Pompeii: A Roman City" exhibition in Montreal's Museum of Fine Arts, the conference "Il falsario e il filologo - Storia di un duello dell'antichita' ad oggi" ("The forger and the philologist: History of a duel from antiquity to today") will be held in Montreal on July 27 and chaired by Luciano Bossina, a professor at the University of Padua. The organisers of the initiative, the Museum of Fine Arts in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Insitute (IIC), note how the philologist of old faced the same enemies as his modern colleagues: mistakes and forgeries. For example, the same text might circulate with different titles and under the names of different authors. How can one say if a word is truly attributable to Lysias, for instance? And, since Hebrew was the original language of the Old Testament, how can we discern whether the Greek version is a translation of the original, a lost text, or a forgery? Forgeries increased as the Catholic Church transformed faith into truth and opinion into heresy: where too many items are true, there must also be many fakes. That is why a forger knows that his main adversary isn't the philosopher or the theologian, but now, as in antiquity, the philologist. The conference, hosted at the Maxwell-Cumming Auditorium, is part of a vast programme of initiatives organised by the IIC from May 24 till the end of the year. The aim is to divulge the excellence of Italian knowledge on the Roman civilization; the historical, archaeological, and documentary heritage it left behind; and to provide information on recent large projects to restore and recover new areas of Pompeii. As an ongoing archeological site, Pompeii is the grounds for Italy's globally recognised primacy in preserving and restoring antiquities. (AGI). .