Antonio Agust??n (1517-1586), bishop of Tarragona, was one of sixteeenth-century Spain’s most famous antiquarian scholars. Like his contemporaries Ambrosio de Morales (1513-1591), Benito Arias Montano (1527-1598), and Juan Fern?°ndez Franco (ca. 1520-1601), Agust??n was skilled in epigraphy and numismatics, and profoundly interested in applying the information that could be had from material remains to writing the history of Spain.
Agust??n was educated at the Spanish college of Bologna, founded by Cardinal Gil de Albornoz in the 14th century. From there, he became Auditor of the Sacred Rota in 1544.
Agust??n was most famous in his own time as a legal scholar, and without a doubt his most famous work is his De legibvs et senatvs consvltis liber (Rome, 1583). Most interesting to me, however, is his 1587 Di?°logo de medallas, inscriciones y otras antiguedades, essentially a manual for teaching antiquarian methodology.1
Agust??n’s Di?°logo is well known to historians for its vituperative opposition to Annius of Viterbo’s famous forgeries, the Antiquitatum Variarum, published in 1498 at Rome by Eucharius Silber and republished many more times throughout the sixteenth century, including by the vaunted Spanish humanist Antonio de Nebrija at Burgos in 1512. (Readers may recall that Annius’ invented chronicles play an important role in Anthony Grafton’s study of academic forgeries.)2 Agust??n‚Äîlike Pietro Ricci, Marcantonio Coccio, Raffaello Maffei, Erasmus; Jacques Lef?®vre d’?âtaples, Juan Luis Vives, Beatus Rhenanus, Melchor Cano, Antonio Agust??n, Gaspar Barreiros, J. J. Scaliger, and Isaac Casaubon‚Äîrefused to believe in Annius’ texts. As Agust??n related,
A. … Latino Latini, a citizen of Viterbo, a learned and trustworthy man, told me that fr. Johannes Annius had sculpted certain characters on a slab, and he had it buried in a vineyard near Viterbo that was soon to be excavated. And when he heard that there were excavators in the vineyard, he had them excavate around the spot where he had buried his slab, saying that he had read in his books about a temple, the oldest in the world, that had stood in that area. And as they excavated near the slab, the first person to hit upon the stone came to Annius to tell him; and he had them uncover it bit by bit, and he began to marvel at the stone and its characters. And, making a copy of it, he went to those in charge of the city, and told them that it would bring great honor on the city to put that stone in the most honorable part of it, because it proved the foundation of Viterbo, which preceded Romulus by two thousand years, since Isis and Osiris founded it; and he told them his fables. And everything that he wished was done. And there are molds of this stone in circulation, and I think that it begins, ‘EGO.SVM.ISIS,’ etc.
C. This must be the authority that Florian de Ocampo adduced, saying that he glossed Berosus [the Chaldean]. I would have considered his work a fraud, if it weren’t for the fact that he dedicated it to the Catholic Monarchs of immortal fame.
A. Luis Vives says of Berosus and of the friar, ‘Alter mulget hircum, alter supponit cribrum,’ which saying Lucian applied to a different end. Giovanni Pontano, Pomponio Leto, Giovanni Camerte, and Cyriac of Ancona were no less ingenious, but they invented their fictions with more elegance; and I don’t know if there are others who forged inscriptions and had medals made with a certain amount of learning.3
- The Di?°logo was reprinted in 1592 in Italian translation as the Dialoghi … intorno alle medaglie, inscrittioni et altre antichit?†. [↩]
- Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). [↩]
- Di?°logo, 447‚Äì449. [↩]