quendam gustum Graiae facundiae: quattro falsi discorsi di oratori attici e i loro lettori tra Umanesimo e Rinascimento

The present study focuses on the Renaissance reception of a collection of four short orations in Latin purported to be translations from the Greek. Of these, the first three pretend to be assembly speeches by Aeschines, Demades and Demosthenes respectively, while the fourth one is a peroration allegedly addressed by Demosthenes to Alexander the Great. These four disocurses were indeed extrapolated from the medieval Supplement to Curtius Rufus (11 th -early 12 th century) by an anonymous scholar around the very beginning of the 15 th century and started circulating as self-standing pieces of Attic oratory. This paper investigates the reasons of the popularity these speeches enjoyed up to the Early Modern period, and try to determine whether and up to which extent were humanists and Renaissance readers unable to detect this forgery.