Konstantinos Minas

According to the Encyclopædia Britannica 1911, which names him as "Minas [Minoïdes]", he was born in Macedonia;[1] in an official statement he made in 1840, his place of birth was given as Voltia, in the province of Salonica, "en Grèce", on 1 December 1788.

[2] Narcisse-Achille de Salvandy, or Abel-François Villemain, his successor as French education minister in 1839, sent Minas on a mission to find Greek manuscripts.

Its publication in 1844, edited by Boissonade from a copy made by Minas, was a scholarly sensation:[4][9][11] Babrius, an author in Greek verse of fables of the type of the Aesopica, was then known only sparsely, with a few fragments published in 1816 by Franz Xaver Berger.

Points raised relate to how he obtained manuscripts and then allowed access to them; how he collated materials without detailed provenance; and the attribution of copies.

[17] Joseph-Michel Guardia wrote an extended review in 1858 of the editions of the Philostratus work by Minas and by Charles Victor Daremberg.

[18] After his death suspicions of forgery or fraud by Minas relating to some alleged manuscript copies of Babrius were widely accepted.

[22] It was widely rejected, as giving credibility to the authorship of Babrius, when internal evidence told strongly against: Lewis died in 1863.

[23] Carel Gabriel Cobet and Dübner condemned the manuscript L papers as forgery; there was some dissent at the time, from Hermann Sauppe and Theodor Bergk.

[24] James Davies, a friend of Lewis, published in 1860 a metrical translation in English of Babrius, from Lewis's text, including fables from the "pseudo-Babrius" manuscript L.[25] He later wrote an 1874 review The Greek Fool in Blackwood's Magazine, in which he called Minas "a Greek well known to European libraries and museums as a manuscript hunter of somewhat unreliable habits and antecedents".

He cited also the opinion of Alfred Eberhard, whose edition of the Philogelos he was reviewing, in Latin: "homo Graecus tot libris inventis, corruptis, ablatis, subditis celeber" (He was a Greek who was famous for the number of books he discovered, destroyed, stole, and concealed).

[27] By the time Wilfrid Oldaker wrote on Babrius in 1934, the consensus position was that Minas had forged part of the text given to Boissonade (completion of fable 123); and manuscript L.[28] British Library Add MS 22807 is described as "Brought by Menas Menoides from Mount Athos, possibly from the Lavra Monastery.