English: From: Pseudo-Phalaris; Francesco Griffolini (trans.), Epistolae, illuminated manuscript on vellum, Italy, ca. 1450. This elegant twenty-two-line manuscript leaf represents a solitary fragment from a much larger volume of letters long attributed to the archaic, sixth-century BCE tyrant Phalaris of Agrigento in Sicily. The letters reflect the ancient moralizing “mirror of princes” genre. Amid the Italian Renaissance restoration of ancient Greek literature, the letters of Phalaris enjoyed a revival that endured well into the early eighteenth century, when they were assumed by many to be authentic and among the earliest epistolary literary works in Western literature. Francesco Griffolini (1420–after 1465), a student of the great humanist and hammer of forgers Lorenzo Valla, undertook to translate the letters of Phalaris between 1440 and 1452, working from a large Greek manuscript in the collection of Pope Nicholas V. It was also in the 1450s that four additional Greek letters of Phalaris emerged from manuscript courses, which Griffolini duly translated. Shortly after his appointment as royal librarian in 1694, the brilliant scholar Richard Bentley gradually demolished the argument for authenticity of the Phalaris letters on sound philological, historical, and logical grounds, proving that the text was actually written some eight centuries later than was widely thought, in the second century CE, possibly by the Hellenistic sophist Adrianus of Tyre.