Four forged orations by Aeschines, Demades and Demosthenes and their reception during the Renaissance

The present study focuses on the Renaissance reception of a collection of four short orations in Latin purported to be translations from the Greek. These four discourses were indeed extrapolated from the medieval Supplement to Curtius Rufus (written around 1100 AD) by an anonymous scholar around the very bedinning of the 15th 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 tries to determine whether and up to which extent humanists and Renaissance readers were unable to detect this forgery.