H. presents a thoughtful, well-researched and interesting contribution to what is rapidly becoming an area of particular fascination for Classicists: the study of ancient fakes and forgeries. The specific focus of H.’s monograph is announced in the first word of the title: Collectors, Scholars, and Forgers in the Ancient World. If any study of this topic today must perforce begin with A. Grafton's crime-story model of forgery – in which the very existence of forgery presupposes a means, motive and opportunity by which it may be accomplished –, then H.’s study offers a specific focus on the motive. Specifically, H. is interested in the appeal that forged documents and artefacts hold for collectors, and thus the high prices they can fetch in the marketplace. Her study accordingly presents a survey of various ancient collectors and antiquaries both real (Croesus, Xerxes, Alexander the Great, Greek and Roman chresmologues) and fictive (Trimalchio and Lucian of Samosata's ‘Ignorant Book-Collector’). The examples are chosen from a broad range of source materials – H. goes on to consider forged artwork, forged documents and inscriptions (with a special focus on the Lindian Chronicle in the latter half of the book), and ultimately offers an account of some differing approaches to Homeric forgery represented by not only the Lindian Chronicle but by documentary sources as different as the text attributed to Dictys of Crete and by Philostratus’ essay On Heroes. The analysis is just as sure-footed in describing numismatic forgeries as it is in discussing the textual evidence provided by Martial's epigrams on nouveau-riche collectors of antiquities, and speaks to a very high level of scholarship in discussing the interrelation between forgers and collectors.

The role played by scholars and scholarship – the tertium quid of the book's title – is a little more slippery in H.’s account, however. H. acknowledges that there are ‘regular and close links between collecting and scholarship, collecting and forgery, and scholarship and forgery’ but ‘the links are not always straightforward’ (p. 76), positing that a skilled scholar is in just as good a position to perpetrate a forgery as to expose one. The examples which provide her with the greatest detail on the role of scholarship in this process come not from the Classical world, but from the Renaissance and after, with accounts of the Shakespeare forgeries of William Henry Ireland and the forged hominid fossil known as ‘Piltdown Man’. These discussions are fascinating in their own right, but they would benefit from H. grappling more openly with the question of why modern parallels are required, or what precisely is missing from the Classical evidence that is being supplied by exempla from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Even if it comes down to the most basic matter of credulity, a fuller discussion of such credulity would be welcome.

H.’s study overall is both readable and erudite – particularly charming is her account of the vicissitudes of Corinthian bronze in the Roman era, and stories about its collectors ranging from Cicero's hostile portrait of Verres, Trimalchio's dizzy report of where it came from and Pliny the Younger's sheepish account of purchasing a modest example of the stuff. These pages offer an example of her method at its best: a recherché and highly coveted consumer item, no longer being manufactured by the time of Cicero, provides the perfect example of art that is susceptible to forgery or spurious authentication. Maybe Trimalchio's frank expression of a preference for glass after boasting at length about his Corinthian bronze comes from the uneasy sense of his own limitations as a connoisseur – or maybe his stated reason (that glass does not smell) is enough to understand his taste. Yet the focus here on the material culture of forgeries necessarily leaves some questions under-examined. It is odd to see a book on this precise topic that includes no reference to Pierre Bourdieu – surely the study of collecting and its material culture requires some theoretical underpinning. On other occasions the specificity of her focus leaves the reader hungry for a more wide-ranging or speculative discussion of the issue at hand: for example, H.’s account of Onomacritus and the forged line that he inserted into the oracles of Musaeus – leading to his expulsion by Hipparchus – focuses solely on the matter of written oracle collections. She accurately presents Onomacritus as having ‘a status akin to that of a rhapsode’ in the tyrant's household (p. 39). But H. leaves unexamined the question of the means whereby a forged oracle might be detected: does it rely on predictive capacity or lack thereof? Or just the uneasy sense on the tyrant's part that somebody is telling him what he wants to hear? Herodotus is vague on the details, and H. notes Herodotus’ omissions but offers no speculations of her own, presumably because they would be tangential to her central thesis. But we therefore get a sense of Onomacritus as an artist trying to play up to his patron, without a real sense of what his art might have entailed.

It is also worth asking whether H.’s definitions of collectors and antiquaries are too circumscribed. Her fascinating and thorough discussion of signatures on ancient sculptures and painting includes Galen's complaints about forged writings circulating under his name, but it sidesteps the much-debated question of the poetic sphragis starting with Theognis, presumably because such purely literary evidence does not involve enough material culture. Aulus Gellius is used on one or two occasions for anecdotes about the value of ancient manuscripts – but are not Gellius, or Athenaeus or even Ptolemy Chennus all collectors, too? Yet they play no role in H.’s account of collecting because they relate less easily to the financial motivations of forgery. But part of what makes the subject of ancient forgery so fascinating is wondering what Ptolemy Chennus’ actual motives could realistically have been – making a sale to Lucian's ‘Ignorant Book-Collector’ (discussed so thoroughly by H.) may be as good a guess as any as to the rationale for such a bizarre text, or Ptolemy Chennus could even be viewed as the response to H.’s claim that ‘no faker as yet from Greece or Rome has been identified as out to thumb his nose’ (p. 244) at the scholarly establishment.

These are all quibbles, however: we should not expect H.’s study to do things that it does not set out to do, but merely acknowledge that it is a valuable contribution within a flourishing field of study of ancient forgeries, providing an account of one particular and specific element of the phenomenon. H. makes an excellent case that, in fact, collectors come first, and ‘with collecting come fraud and scholarship’ (p. 240). H.’s book is recommended, then, as an excellent addition to the growing body of scholarship regarding one of the most interesting areas of investigation for Classicists at the present moment.