Friedrich August Wolf

For most of history, though, these were fringe worries, and it took until 1795 for someone to explore them properly.

That year, the German philologist Friedrich August Wolf published a Latin treatise arguing that writing wasn't available for literary use in Homer's supposed lifetime.

He claimed that no poet could have composed works of such length without it.

Our Iliad and Odyssey, he concluded, were compilations, assembled from shorter oral songs and polished by later editors, notably in Athens.

These affiliations of language and the possibility of making inferences about the history of human cultures before we have textual evidence to support those inferences was a discovery which left the general public, not just specialists, thunderstruck.

The tree models of the descent of languages constructed by the historical philologists were Darwin's inspiration for the one diagram in The Origin of Species, which is a tree model of the descent of species.

So historical philology can hold its own against the most spectacular of scientific discoveries, and it is still finding out things.

It is still the case, for example, that philological methods can be used to detect forgeries and to do so quite reliably.

Before the advent of computer-assisted methods, it was possible to detect, as the German classical philologist Friedrich August Wolf did in the early 19th century, that the Iliad and the Odyssey probably had been written by different people simply by looking at the structure, the philological structure, the grammatical structure, in the same way that literary scholars could detect that Shakespeare had co-authored a play with John Fletcher by disentangling the quirks of language.

This can now be done easily and quickly by computer, but those are simply the methods of philologists on steroids.

I was thinking of a really early example, which would be, if I'm remembering right, Lorenzo Valla showing that the-

Yes, the Donation of Constantine.