The First Pagan Historian traces the reception history of a text that is now largely neglected but once occupied a central role in the ancient canon—the De excidio Troiae historia or History of the Destruction of Troy of one Dares Phrygius, who claimed to have been an eyewitness observer of the Trojan War. From late antiquity (when most scholars today now agree that the extant Latin version of the text was written) to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, this study charts the many surprising twists and turns in the afterlife of an author long considered the first of the pagans to write history. It examines the subversive challenge that Dares posed to other ancient canonical traditions (especially the poetry of Homer and Virgil), and the manner in which Dares’s bold rewriting of the Troy story enabled centuries of postclassical readers to forge their own—sometimes radical—visions of the distant past. In doing so, The First Pagan Historian moves back and forth between the ancient world itself and various moments in the Middle Ages and the early modern period. The book uses the fortunes of a forged text to interrogate approaches to history, fiction, myth, philology, criticism, authorship, and numerous other topics of profound importance to the interplay between antiquity and modernity.