The Greek texts of the Homeric epics did not circulate in the medieval West until the late fourteenth century; Latin Europe consequently knew the matter of Troy only from Latin intermediaries. The plot of the Iliad, for example, was accessible only in a short verse epitome known as the Ilias Latina. The late antique Latin prose text De excidio Troiae historia (History of the Destruction of Troy) ostensibly provided an eyewitness account of the Trojan War purportedly translated by the Roman historian Cornelius Nepos from a Greek original composed by a Trojan combatant, Dares the Phrygian―although no Greek source text survives. A second Latin prose text, the Ephemeris belli Troiani (Journal of the Trojan War), attributed to Dictys the Cretan, was translated from a Greek source text of which several papyrus fragments survive. Of these three texts, Dares's Historia circulated the most widely and transmitted a definitive, non-Homeric, version of the Trojan War to the Latin West. In The First Pagan Historian: The Fortunes of a Fraud from Antiquity to the Enlightenment, Frederic Clark traces the medieval afterlife and early modern survival of Dares's text to 1800―long after the arrival of the Homeric epics from the Greek East and their cultivation by humanists in the West. As Clark accords equal attention to the medieval and early modern circulation of Dares's text in manuscript and print, The First Pagan Historian magisterially charts Dares's changing status, from Isidore of Seville's designation of Dares as the “first pagan historian” (6) to the early modern classification of Dares as a fraud for claiming to have fought at Troy and preserved an eyewitness record. Clark's analysis of Dares's text and its long afterlife focuses on a range of topics, such as canon formation, textual authenticity, and the relationship between history and fiction, antiquity and truth in the Latinate textual traditions of Western Europe.

In the initial three chapters of The First Pagan Historian,Clark examines the origins of Dares's Historia in the fifth or sixth century and its reception in medieval Latinity, beginning with Isidore. Clark chronicles the medieval uses of Dares's text in support of Trojan foundation myths for Western European polities and the poetic rewriting of Dares's text by Joseph of Exeter, which contradicted Dares's own dismissal of poetic authority in favor of the truth value of prose. If Dares's presence in medieval Latin traditions is ultimately too pervasive to be covered in a few chapters, Clark's contribution to this topic takes us some way toward a comprehensive appreciation of this late antique author “who was once canonical but is now marginal” (39). The medieval material in The First Pagan Historian could be used in tandem in with the recent database compiled by N. Kivilcim Yavuz (and overlooked by Clark), Transtextual Networks in the European Middle Ages: A Digital Corpus of the Trojan Latin Manuscripts (https://www.transtextual.net/manuscripts/).

In the last three chapters and the conclusion of The First Pagan Historian, Clark traces Dares's itinerary in the early modern world. He offers a compelling case study of Bruno Latour's premise “We have never been modern” (We Have Never Been Modern, 1993): though one might expect that access to the Homeric epics together with the humanist bias toward Greek source texts would have banished Dares's Historia as apocrypha by the end of the fifteenth century, Clark demonstrates just how tenaciously Dares's text continued to circulate in the early modern West—with nine incunabula followed by numerous early modern printed editions—despite repeated challenges to its authenticity from humanists such as Coluccio Salutati and Lorenzo Valla. Clark, however, shows how these challenges perpetuated rather than negated medieval scholarly values, which kept Dares at the center of the debates about myth and history that persisted throughout the sixteenth century. The Elizabethan scholar John Dee and the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Della Porta, for instance, both endorsed the historical truths and moral exempla to be found in Dares's text. The print culture and the encyclopedism of the sixteenth century continued to favor Dares's status as an ancient eyewitness, thereby reinforcing Isidore's early medieval classification of Dares as the first pagan historian.

The confessional conflicts sweeping Europe in the seventeenth century brought a renewed focus on textual forgery, best exemplified in Joseph Scaliger's work on historical chronology that led him to classify both Dares and Dictys as frauds. In addition, the emerging principles of philology produced pejorative judgments regarding Dares's less than elegant Latinity, which by definition would exclude his text from the classical canon. As Clark shows, however, the debate known as “the quarrel of the ancients and moderns” (34) in the late seventeenth century kept Dares alive into the Enlightenment. Among the more extreme skeptics who emerge from this quarrel is the Jesuit Jean Hardouin, who extended the charge of forgery beyond Dares and Dictys to include all but a few classical authors: Hardouin deemed only Cicero and Homer to be authentic, and he claimed that all other texts attributed to ancient authors had been forged by Benedictine monks during the Middle Ages.

By the time the first modern edition of Dares's text appeared in 1873, Dares had ceased to animate debates about the values of history and myth, and Clark covers Dares's fate only until the Enlightenment; Dares has, however, recently found a champion in the promoters of a “New Chronology” associated with the Russian mathematician and conspiracy theorist Anatoly T. Fomenko. Fomenko dates the start of human history from 800 CE; by rejecting Scaliger's classification of Dares's text as forgery, Fomenko entirely discredits Scaliger's chronology to promote an imperial vision of global history centered on Russia. Fomenko follows Hardouin in claiming that all extant textual and material traces of antiquity were fabricated in the Middle Ages; in the process, Fomenko cites Dares's eyewitness claims as historical proof that the Trojan War and the Crusades were actually same historical event (Anatoly T. Fomenko, History: Fiction or Science, vol. 2, trans. Michael Jagger [2005], 117–20). Fomenko's “New Chronology” suggests that Dares may continue to find his way into controversies about the authenticity of antiquity, as Clark has so thoroughly documented for the early modern world.