A Disguise So Thin: Historical Cases of Mistaken Identity

"That’s what the history books all say."
"And do you believe the history books?"
"Well… yeah."

-- An exchange between a student and a Comparative Literature professor, January 2010

It is popular to think of history in the same way as one might think of the Superman mythos— a concrete set of events, dates, names. Smallville is presented as a prequel to the Superman story; to view it in a different way, the show can be viewed as a behind-the-scenes history of Superman. Smallville’s writers delight in twisting what we think we know, crafting a show that could be subtitled “Lies the Mythos Told Me.”

The episode “Legion” (8.11) draws this issue to the forefront. In the time of the Legion of Superheroes, Superman is history. There is a museum dedicated to his feats and the smallest details are known about him, including the story of the first baseball he ever hit. And yet, there are things they don’t know, including the identity of Chloe Sullivan, Clark Kent’s best friend and someone apparently absent from the life of Superman. The episode throws Chloe’s fate out as a historical mystery for the Legionnaires. Who is she? If she is so important, why don’t they know who she is? Why have they never heard of Chloe Sullivan?

Simply put, Chloe Sullivan is "lost in the annals of history."

She is in good company. History, far from being a set sequence of dates and people, is full of holes and mysteries, slips and misconceptions. From the ancient to the modern, people have been lost in history, jumbled or confused with a sibling, pushed into question or hidden by conspiracy. History is full of mistakes and mysteries with regards to the identity of some of its players.

Smenkhkare ^[1]

King SmenkhkareEgypt is a paradox, at once ancient and mysterious… and quite well-known by contemporary audiences. Two of Egypt’s most famous Pharaohs are the heretical Akhenaten, often considered one of the earliest monotheistic monarchs, and Tutankhamen, the famous murdered boy-king. Technically, neither of those commonly held beliefs are true, but the subject of this section is Smenkhkare, the Pharaoh who ruled between them and is almost wholly forgotten.

Despite the popular appeal of the period, little is known about this Pharaoh. The dates of “his” reign are uncertain, though it is known that “he” reigned from Akhenaten’s capital of Amarna. Smenkhkare shared a co-regency with Akhenaten, but it is not known when.^[2]

It is believed that “he” was somehow related to his predecessor. The “he” lies in quotes because the gender of this Pharaoh is one of the things that is not known, concretely, about him. Some theories make him the son of Akhenaten; others a younger brother; a popular one, based on evidence gleaned from naming practices and art from the period, claims the identity of Smenkhkare to be Nefertiti, Akhenaten’s famous queen.

A mummy was found believed to be his, but the deliberate destruction of certain writings from this period has shrouded the historical record in questions and debate; DNA testing may confirm blood relation, but it cannot repair a broken cartouche. In any case, the true identity of this short-lived Pharaoh was buried, along with much of Akhenaten’s Amarna legacy, as Egypt moved back into more orthodox religious practices.

Gneaus Ahenobarbus ^[3]

Ara PacisThe Roman emperor Nero is one of the most infamous characters in history, and he was destined to be such from his birth, if one believes vice to be genetic. Suetonius, one of the major sources for imperial biography, shows, case by case, that Nero’s paternal side was almost completely comprised of bad seeds.

His father’s family was the Domitii Ahenobarbi, aristocrats who were infamous for cruel actions, according to Suetonius. This tradition was embraced by Nero’s father, Gneaus Ahenobarbus; by all accounts, the man was a bastard. Suetonius records his immense cruelty when he was on campaign in Armenia on the staff of Gaius Caesar, Augustus' grandson, around the turn of the first century CE. His brutality caused him to be dismissed from service, but that did not sway him from his bad behavior. He continued his cruel ways on his own in the East for an unrecorded period of time, before returning to Rome to father the famous fiddler.

Abbreviated Julio-Claudian Family TreeThe problem with this is that it’s impossible: Nero’s father Gneaus Ahenobarbus could not have been born any earlier than 5 BC (2 BC is the accepted date) which means that he would have been serving on the staff of a general at the age of five.

The reality of this situation is that a different member of the Ahenobarbi went to the East with Gaius Caesar and probably died there; it is almost certain that this was the older of two sons, who can be seen on the Augustus’ Altar of Peace.

The Ahenobarbi had specific naming practices; Suetonius records this as well, explaining that the Ahenobarbi always alternated first names— Gneaus then Lucius. With the death of a Gneaus, the probable solution is that his little brother was given his name, causing confusion to historians not even two hundred years later. This confusion has become accepted by modern historians too lazy to do math (a surprising number).

Shakespeare ^[4]

Shakespeare: (authenticity uncertain)A heated debate between two groups, one which believes the name and the famous writer align, the other which believes the identity of the writer to go beyond a mere birth name— the Stratfordian/anti-Stratfordian debate aligns nicely with Smallville fandom.

The gist of the theory is thus: there was a man called Will Shakspere [sic] who came to London from Stratford-upon-Avon, but for centuries, it has been called into debate whether or not this man was really the playwright Shakespeare. There is a great deal of speculation around this question, such as how a man who never traveled or received a full education could have written those plays or why Shakspere's death wasn't publicly mourned, or on the opposite side, why monuments built within a decade of his death would associate him with a pen if Shakspere wasn't a writer.

It hasn’t quite been five hundred years since Shakespeare stopped publishing, the records are good, though problematic (for instance, we have his will but there is no standardized spelling of his name), and he's the most famous literary figure in history— and we still can't come to a conclusive ruling.

The debate rages on, and will forever, probably. The two strongest possibilities, aside from the traditional Stratfordian one, are the Oxfordian theory and the Marlovian theory; the former holds that the true author of Shakespeare’s plays was Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, the latter that it was in fact Christopher Marlowe who penned the famous works, after faking his own death for political reasons.

Misconceptions

Romanov Grand DuchessesHistory is full of these mysteries and misconceptions of identity. How often is it noted that Servilius Caepio, the man whose engagement to Julius Caesar’s daughter was broken so that she could marry someone else, was in fact one of the men who killed him—Marcus Brutus, the most famous of the assassins?

Or that the missing Romanov daughter was not Anastasia - despite the fact that she was the subject of at least three movies, many novels, and countless claims to the Russian throne - but was in fact probably her older sister Maria, confused with the youngest daughter despite the personal account of the man who shot Anastasia? Despite the fact that the United States celebrates Columbus Day, we do not really know his birth name.

Identity has always been a fluid thing; when thinking historically, one has a tendency to freeze it, to settle on one name, easy to look up in a history book. Only it isn’t always that simple. The time-traveling Legionnaires find gaps in the story they’ve been told almost immediately ("I’ll admit a lot of history might be wrong," Rokk tells Clark), including something as basic as Superman’s refusal to kill and something as major as the name of his best friend and partner.

Or did they?

Who is Chloe Sullivan, in the end? After all, they had heard of Lana Lang, Jimmy Olson, and a girl named Lois Lane. Why not Chloe, who Clark so vehemently declares "does not die?" Perhaps the Legionnaires themselves answer the question: "Maybe Kal-El wanted Chloe to go under a different name when he started flying— you know, to protect her." Perhaps, like so many others in the history books, she does become someone else; it wouldn’t be the first time the idea of a different name was broached with regards to Chloe Sullivan and we all know that her pseudonym of choice, in Season Three’s Delete, was Lois Lane.

One thousand years from now, how will humanity think of Marilyn Monroe or Marilyn Manson? Will the history books record Harry Houdini or Erik Weisz? Even now, do we think of Vladimir Lenin or Vladimir Ulyanov, Gerald Ford or Leslie King, Elizabeth Cochrane or Nellie Bly? If someone told you Eric Arthur Blair wrote 1984, would you say they were wrong?

Taking such cases into account, is it really so unbelievable that in a thousand years, a simple name change might get buried? That history might look back on the events in Smallville's time period and ignore a name change that, in fact, changes everything?