Pseudo-documentarism is a strategy in which an author claims—with varying degrees of irony—to have discovered an authentic document which he transmits to his readers. This article explores three texts of pseudo-documentary fiction from the Imperial period (Dictys’ Journal of the Trojan War , Antonius Diogenes’ The Wonders Beyond Thule , and Lucian’s True Histories ). By suggesting ways in which the implied readers of these texts may be relatable to “real,” exodiegetic readers, the article illustrates how pseudo-documentarism reflects aspects of the contemporary literary and cultural Zeitgeist .

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Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realised that not infrequently books speak of other books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then a place of a long centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing…Umberto Eco The Name of the Roseat ego tibi sermone isto Milesio uarias fabulas conseram auresque tuas beniuolas lepido susurro permulceam… (But I would join together a variety of tales for you in that Milesian mode, and I would enchant your kindly ears with a charming murmur…)The speaking book? Apuleius MetamorphosesIn the chapter called ‘Terce’ of the Second Day, the Franciscan monk William of Baskerville and his young apprentice Adso visit the scriptorium of an abbey in northern Italy, and discover, among the papers of the murdered Greek translator Venantius, a surprising text:Another Greek book was open on the lectern, the work on which Venantius had been exercising his skill as translator in the past days. At that time I knew no Greek, but my master read the title and said this was by a certain Lucian and was the story of a man turned into an ass. I recalled then a similar fable by Apuleius, which, as a rule, novices were strongly advised against reading.(Eco, The Name of the Rose, 128)

Dictys of Crete's Journal of the Trojan War seems to invite the reader to imagine two different versions of the imaginary ancient Ur-text: one that was written in Phoenician language and script, and another that was written using ‘Phoenician letters’ but whose language was Greek. What is the meaning of the text's different fantasies of its own origins? And how is the reader to understand the puzzlingly implausible Punico-Greek text that is envisaged in Septimius' prefatory letter? This article examines first why the Journal's fantasy Ur-text changed as the Dictys-text itself evolved, and what the text's fiction of its own origins can tell us, not only about its readers' contemporary context, but also about their fantasies about their own literary past – and future as well. Secondly, comparison with the work of Dionysius Skytobrachion, himself the author of a pseudo-documentary Troy-history, offers a new interpretation of what, precisely, Septimius' ‘Punic letters’ may have represented in ancient readers' minds, and opens up a new (imaginary) literary hinterland in the heroic past for the fictional author Dictys and his text.