Jean Hardouin

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Jean Hardouin (1646 - September 3, 1729), French classical scholar, was born at Quimper in Brittany.

Having acquired a taste for literature in his father's book-shop, he sought and obtained about his sixteenth year admission into the order of the Jesuits. In Paris, where he went to study theology, he ultimately became librarian of the College Louis le Grand in 1683, and he died there on the 3rd of September 1729.

His first published work was an edition of Themistius (1684), which included no fewer than thirteen new orations. On the advice of Jean Gamier (1612-1681) he undertook to edit the Natural History of Pliny for the Dauphin series, a task which he completed in five years. His attention having been turned to numismatics as auxiliary to his great editorial labours, he published several learned works in that department, marred, however, as almost everything he did was marred, by a determination to be at all hazards different from other interpreters. It is sufficient to mention his Nummi antiqui populorum et urbium illustrati (1684), Antirrheticus de nummis antiquis coloniarum et municipiorum (1689), and Chronologia Veteris Testamenti ad vulgatam versionem exacta et nummis illustrata (1696).

By the ecclesiastical authorities Hardouin was appointed to supervise the Conciliorum collectio regia maxima (1715); but he was accused of suppressing important documents and foisting in apocryphal matter, and by the order of the parlement of Paris (then at war with the Jesuits) the publication of the work was delayed. It is really a valuable collection, much cited by scholars.

Hardouin declared that all the councils supposed to have taken place before the council of Trent were fictitious. It is, however, as the originator of a variety of paradoxical theories that Hardouin is now best remembered. The most remarkable, contained in his Chronologiae ex nummis antiquis restitutae (1696) and Prolegomena ad censuram veterum scriptorum, was to the effect that, with the exception of the works of Homer, Herodotus and Cicero, the Natural History of Pliny, the Georgics of Virgil, and the Satires and Epistles of Horace, all the ancient classics of Greece and Rome were spurious, having been manufactured by monks of the 13th century, under the direction of a certain Severus Archontius. He denied the genuineness of most ancient works of art, coins and inscriptions, and declared that the New Testament was originally written in Latin. This theory has a modern heir in the Russian mathematician Anatoly Timofeevich Fomenko, whose conclusions are even more radical.