The World’s Second Oldest Profession

There are rival models of literary composition. One is the ‘Romantic’ conception of the author, often a poet supercharged with inspiration and writing wholly in isolation. Think Yeats, Shelley, Baudelaire. A competing model, the guild model, is artisanal and collaborative, involving, at times, whole teams of anonymous journeyman writers. Both models generate great literature. Yes, there is William Butler Yeats, who composed some of the finest poetry ever written in that symbolic tower, Thoor Ballylee. But there is also that team of 47 scholars and translators who brought us the King James Bible, arguably the most influential book in the English language. Readers do instinctively want to name a single author for a work and so the Romantic model remains the most familiar to the popular imagination. Was it for this same reason that compositions by different hands all came to be gathered under the name of Homer? Indeed, the collaborative model has a long and significant history. The Romantic model may persist but the truth is out: ghostwriting is the world’s second oldest profession.

The further back we go in the historical record, the more we see, in fact, how the history of ghostwriting is, in so many ways, the history of the written word. The Ancient Greeks are traditionally credited with pioneering early forms of ghostwriting; in Classical Athens, ‘logographers’ were hired to compose speeches in the voices of litigants, who would then deliver them orally in court. The truth, however, is that ghostwriting originated earlier among the Sumerians. The first named author was the Sumerian priestess Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon of Akkad, the famed Akkadian ruler of the twenty-fourth and twenty-third centuries BCE. The priestess’ authorship was a convenient fiction—literate slaves wrote for her, and her name was appended to the work. Using a single author’s name, irrespective of who wrote a given text, was common in the ancient world. Torahic and rabbinic Jewish writings involved multiple scribes and accrued over centuries. These works were then attributed to a heroic figure of the distant past, like a great rabbi or Enoch, the father of Methuselah. Essentially, attribution to a respected author added cultural cachet to a text. This attribution of anonymous scribal writing to a significant figure or a divinity gave a text weight, authority and influence as great as the Gospels or the Epistles that Paul ‘wrote.’ Ghostwriters, thus, have made a substantial contribution to the development of civilisation.

The question then arises: Does it even matter if Paul, a Sumerian priestess or Homer wrote anything—or even existed? Often, we want them to have lived and to have written said text, like Patanjali of the Yoga Sutras. This desire may come from our need to find a ‘point of origin’, or even recommend a work on the basis of a famous author’s reputation. Euripides, we now know, did not write the play ‘Rhesus’ and yet was so prominent a playwright that the work was ascribed to him nonetheless. Many classical works were not written by the author to whom they were ascribed. The name ‘pseudo-Ovid’ is used to refer to 23 literary compositions that were “works not authored by Ovid that circulated under his name.” Elevating a name to mythic status once scribes and compilers began to redact source texts and sew separate compositions together was very much a part of this saga. To quote Napoleon, whether he in fact said it or wrote it at all, ‘History is a set of lies agreed upon’ and ghostwriters have been there from the beginning, writing our history, our poetry, our myths.

Writing in the Roman Empire was more commonly understood as an exercise involving a division of labour and work by a team that would include enslaved scribes, researchers, assistants, and secretaries. Famous examples of named authors reliant on collaboration include Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BCE–43 BCE) and his younger brother, Quintus. An amanuensis was a slave who provided literary and secretarial services, such as taking dictation and assisting in correspondence and story writing. Some of these writers earned freedom from bondage through the act of manumission as a reward for their labours, incentivising slaves to become learned. Ghostwriting was then so pervasive in the first century CE that educator and rhetorician Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (Quintilian) felt the need to warn against the use of these early literary hacks—because their work would not be as authentic, well-written or reliable as work composed in isolation.

Despite what we now know about attribution and collaboration, the need for a single author persists. This, in fact, began to dominate before the Romantic movement began in the late 18^th century. With a growing emphasis in the West on the role and importance of the individual, the conception of the modern author in full ownership of their content advanced during the Enlightenment. Daniel Defoe did write the (arguably) first English novel, Robinson Crusoe, under his own name but there is an irony to him doing so. Although he was himself a solitary man and his novel champions the individualism of the Enlightenment, Defoe published voluminously under a variety of pseudonyms and was himself an active ghostwriter, scribing the autobiography of notorious criminal Jack Sheppard. This ‘man as island’ concept has subsequently found expression in related aesthetic theories of creativity and research into originality [see Haynes and Botha].

Historical records show how contributions by friends, spouses, and advisors were a recurring feature in writing attributed even to the solitary author, including toward such eminent luminaries as John Keats, John Stuart Mill, and T. S. Eliot. These co-writers, generally not credited for their assistance, did work we may now call ghostwriting. This is not unlike the custom of academic authors using teams of researchers to collect or write material which then gets used in a book credited to one single author. This big-picture view can also put the ‘Did Shakespeare write his own plays’ question to rest—writing teams were simply common throughout the Elizabethan theatres, as Gutenberg had liberated publishing. The sheer volume of works in demand necessitated writing teams.

Defoe offers us another interesting angle still; a bridge between the competing models of the solitary poet and the guild writer, for the secluded author is the hermit of old. Master Blaise, in our image above, was the scribe of Merlin. Blaise, who is seen holding a knife and quill, symbolises the writer who keeps myth alive. Like many story groups that cycle, the Arthurian literary cycles were largely works of unknown authorship. Blaise is seen here writing the legend of King Arthur and the quest for the Holy Grail: like a painting of Homer reading, or Paul writing, Blaise represents many individual hands.

There is, however, the work that was written exclusively and absolutely by a single uncredited other. In 1521, King Henry VIII published his Defence of the Seven Sacraments, an excoriating piece of anti-Protestant polemic for which the Pope awarded him the title of Defender of the Faith, and which secured the king an international reputation for scholarship and learning; it was written for him by Sir Thomas More, who was later executed when the king changed his mind, broke with Rome, and established his own church.

Ghostwriters have continually helped change the public perception of kings and leaders, from Napoleon to Ronald Reagan, and mostly out of necessity—making a living as a writer is simply very hard. H. P. Lovecraft would ghost to make ends meet, and Mozart used his talent to write work for patrons to claim as their own. And all of the examples here provide only the briefest glimpse into how pervasive ghostwriting has been throughout history, and due to the significance of the epic, how important it has been to civilisation.

Today, we are going through significant changes in how we view authorship and ownership of content. Memes, ChatGPT, Wikipedia, and open-source or open-platform tech are complicating, and even replacing, received ideas of authorship and individual creativity. Yet this perceived ‘revolution,’ in fact, fits snugly into the collaborative model that ghostwriters, the unnamed scribes of old, have always been familiar with—for ghostwriting is, and always will be, the world’s second oldest profession.