The Twins was composed between October 1945 and January 1946 in Sydney, and at the guesthouse of a sheep station near Goulburn, New South Wales—a property that belonged to a friend of the family, and which Asquith visited from time to time, leaving a few pounds to show gratitude and ensure he’d be welcome again. He could afford these displays. In the evening, the window of the Goulburn property’s guesthouse offered Asquith a perfect picture of a bucolic sort of sunset, providing him with an image for the comedy’s beginning, a dusk scene that introduced Polydeuces and Kastor, as the twins hurried through a field with stolen cattle.

Asquith’s fake—which he presented as a translation of a manuscript that could be attributed to Bion of Smyrna, written about 1000 BC, and transcribed by the late scholar Christoph Ziegler—was first tested on a colleague at the British Consulate, an unprofessional reader of ancient Greek. Under secretive terms (‘Do come, it’s important, I’ll explain later’), Asquith invited this man to his Sydney flat, lightly furnished in the expatriate style. He waited until after they’d finished the small meal he’d prepared—small because he didn’t want to drag the moment out—before producing the notebook in which he’d written his comic play. Or, as he said, Bion of Smyrna’s play. Asquith also served up a pile of folio papers, these being the English translation of the fabricated comedy. He’d made an interesting discovery, he said, as regards to the beginnings of Western literature: a lost Greek play, a great comedy, something of a jackpot, overlooked by a dead German scholar.

‘I had no idea you had such a mind!’ said Asquith’s colleague after reading the translation. ‘And the notebook came to you when you were a student? It’s a wonder you didn’t stick with the classics. Perhaps you might reconsider that career move.’

‘Your opinion of the play? Did you follow the Greek?’

‘The translation reads beautifully. Look here, I had no idea, Ian—none of us at the consulate had any idea you were at work on this. We thought you were nothing but another windbag.’

For several weeks Asquith told no one else about the play, and instead he worried incessantly about the project. His anxiety concerned the quality of the fabrication, not fear of his fraud being exposed, and he suspected his colleague had been insincere in his praise for the play. Asquith was of the belief that other people traded in insincerity more readily than the time of day.