Wikipedia talk:List of hoaxes on Wikipedia/Philodoppides

Disputed
Philodoppides appears to be an imaginative and well-crafted hoax. The name Φιλοδοππίδης and declined forms appears nowhere in the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, nor does *Ἑλεηνηΐς. Gerber 1997: 174-5, which is said to provide his dates, is about Sappho fr. 16. Callimachus frr. 439-40 Pf., said to be P.'s entry in the Pinakes, are about the comic poets Alexis and Diphilus. No scholion on Iliad 12.274 is recorded by Bekker. The elegiac couplet cited as a fragment is reasonably convincing, but no lyric poet uses ναυτικά, a word of Attic historiography. The Suda would hardly condemn P.'s μέλη on Helen if the Heleneis was a hexameter poem (though the reference to Philostratus is a nice touch).

An ancient account of the Trojan War from Helen's perspective, even a lost one, would be a wonderful thing to have recorded. Unfortunately, however, Philodoppides seems to be a new Bilitis. In the words attributed to Lesimbrotus of Cos:

οὐ Φιλοδοππίδεώ τις ἐπέφραδεν οὔνομα μάρτυς,

κείνου δ᾿ ὡς Μεγαρέων οὐ λόγος οὐδ᾿ ἀριθμός. Poimenlaon (talk) 13:34, 4 July 2023 (UTC)


 * @Liz, might some sort of corrective administrator action be appropriate here? This seems to be a long perpetrated and subtle hoax. @LegesRomanorum created the article in 2020 and removed a "disputed" tag from the page as recently as July 2023. Additionally, I think @Will classics 1993 is possibly a sock of @LegesRomanorum as Will classics 1993 edited the page saying that they were changing the name of a fictitious poem to its conventional title "(Heleniad --> Heleneis passim (this is the conventional title of the poem". Their edit history is similar in other ways as well.--Jahaza (talk) 22:57, 21 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I was going to bring this up at WP:ANB. I broadly agree with : LegesRomanorum abused their standing as an established editor to create an elaborately deceptive hoax. I think a long-term block would be warranted. Modussiccandi (talk) 06:32, 22 August 2023 (UTC)
 * needs to reply here. This was a really strange thing to have done. I agree with others, it looks as if Will classics 1993 was a sock, invented for that one day, to give a bit more edit history to Philodoppides. Andrew Dalby 13:14, 25 August 2023 (UTC)