“Truth” is a concept with wide philosophical and moral implications. It forms a category by which statements can be classed relative to their referentiality. For what we conventionally call “literature,” the concept seems unusable, insofar as there is conventionally a reflected agreement between a literary text and its reader that what is depicted in the text is presented in such a way that it (merely) gives the impression of having happened. Literature thus works in a mode of a kind that may pointedly be characterized as an “as if” mode. The relation between the text (or author) and the readers who accept such an “as if” mode is termed “fictionality,” and fictionality is thus part of the modern conception of literature.
It is different with texts that claim to possess a reference to reality1 and to depict it: a medical treatise, a geographical study or a grammar textbook raise the expectation in a reader that the authors have presented their objects – naturally insofar as their competence permits – in accordance with the existing state of knowledge. These kinds of texts are conventionally classed as “non-fiction” or “factual,” and it is possible to make a judgment about them in the categories of “correct” and “true” or “false” and “untrue/lies” (in the latter case authorial intention would be assumed). A necessary precondition for a classification of this kind is the assumption that the statements made by the text can be checked (and, tied to this, that the author has undertaken such a process of checking as part of the composition of the text). In this basic distinction between fictional and non-fictional texts, however, a further differentiation needs to be introduced, for we should not assume that the type of reading behavior that forms the pact between text and reader is unchanging. Reading habits may (1) change over time as the reader’s horizons of understanding change; and they may (2) be pursued at the same time by different groups in different ways. This problem becomes especially prominent in the case of religious texts. The groups that share the religion in question will class texts of this type as a revelation or as “sacred texts” and so will read them as non-fiction, while other groups, for whom the religion expressed in the texts is not binding, tend to read the same texts as fiction. This kind of varied reading behavior may be present “synchronically,” i.e. when both “believers” and “non-believers” are reading the text in the same period, or it may be present diachronically, when belief in that religion as a whole has disappeared and only “non-believing” readers exist.
Greek literature has an interesting relation to the division into fictional and factual texts and to the dimension of fictionality. On the one hand, it is not yet clear at what point in Greek cultural history one may assume fictionality as an element in the Greeks’ engagement with texts; on the other hand, in Greek culture the category of “myth” appears as a type of discourse that cannot be related to the dichotomy of fiction vs. facts. Whether and to what extent the question of fictionality is interrelated with this question has not yet been definitively determined. The close connection between myth and the question of fictionality is demonstrated concisely in one of the earliest Greek texts, Hesiod’s Theogony.2 There the poet, in depicting how the Muses initiated him as a poet (22–34),3 has these goddesses themselves announce:
Field-dwelling shepherds, ignoble disgraces, mere bellies:/ we know how to say many false things (pseudea) similar to genuine ones,/ but we know, when we wish, how to proclaim true things (alethea).”
(26–28, transl. Most 20064)
In this passage – one of the most frequently discussed in Greek poetry5 – it may be noted first that “truth” is named as a central characteristic of poetry, and this is done from a position depicted as self-evidently authoritative (it is the Muses who speak, i.e. the central sources of poetic inspiration as commonly understood in the archaic period). However, and the Muses state this explicitly, this is to cite only one of the possibilities of poetry. For if the Muses wish it, poetry can express “many false things, similar to genuine ones.” Literature, we may conclude from this, is for Hesiod either factual/referential or “false” / “lies.” To judge from this passage, the specific capacity of literature to model the beautiful, the interesting, the significant as a fictive world in the mode of “as if,” was unknown to early Greek critical reflection on literature, as no particular concept had been found for it. It is even barred as a possible way of thinking about the issue by the use of the term pseudos, which holds a broad spectrum of meanings that ranges from an ontological dimension (pseudos as simple opposition to “true”) through to an essentially moral classification (pseudos as “lie”).
To what does this statement of the Muses apply? Unless we wish to read this short speech as a definition of poetry according to which it always contains both truth and falsehood,6 then it must characterize two essentially different kinds of poetry; in that case, on the basis of the context, Hesiodic poetry (whether it is defined as didactic poetry or as Sachepos, “factual epic”) must be what is characterized by the epithet “true.” A large number of scholars have – quite logically – taken the other type of poetry, classed as pseudos, to be the Homeric poems (e.g. Kannicht 1980/1996, Puelma 1989). Hesiod would thus be criticizing or at least relativizing the use of the Muses in Homeric epic, and doing so through the Muses themselves, who function as Hesiod’s spokespersons, for example in Iliad 2.484–7:
Tell me now, you Muses who have dwellings on Olympus – for you are goddesses and are present and know all things, but we hear only a rumor and know nothing – who were the leaders and lords of the Danaans.
(transl. Murray/Wyatt 1999)
In the catalogue of the Greek troops at Troy that follows, the Muses would thus have let the poet/aoidos recite inaccurate information, especially as the poet himself admits at Il. 2. 486 that he has no knowledge of his own. Nonetheless, it would be too simplistic to read Hesiod’s Speech of the Muses as a criticism of Homeric (fictional) epic on account of its fictional character, in contrast to Hesiodic (factual) epic. For: “no Greek ever regarded the Homeric epics as substantially fiction.” (West 1966, 46). Further, Hesiod himself in the Theogony recounts combats between gods in the mode of heroic epic, and so in principle he too would be exposed to similar criticism.
We may conclude from this that the term pseudos here addresses not the “what” but the “how” of epic poetry. This is astonishing, as it is precisely this “what” that – already in later Greek literary criticism – is conventionally termed “myth.”
The word mythos, in one of its primary senses in Archaic literature, means “(solemn) word,” “(elevated) speech,” and, derived from this, “tale” or “story.” It can be used as a synonym of logos. It is only in the fifth century that an opposition develops between mythos, which at that time starts to be used for a poetic narrative with no claim to truth, and logos, a report that is reliable in the historical sense.7 In a further step mythos comes to be used for the plot of an epic or a tragedy (Arist. Poet. 1449b5), and finally in the systematic analysis of rhetorical theory a distinction is made over the degree of facticity of a “narrative” (dihegesis/narratio), namely between “historia” (Latin: res vera), “plasma” (Lat.: res ficta or argumentum) and “mythos” (Lat.: res fabulosa or fabula). Through this last development, myth is defined as a narrative of things that could not happen (as opposed to “plasma”: things that could have happened but did not).8 Through this definition of rhetorical terms, the material of epic and tragedy could be classed as myths, because they contain narratives about events that involve gods (as in the Iliad), fabulous creatures (such as the Cyclops in the Odyssey, the sphinx and its riddles in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex etc.) or heroes with fabulous qualities (like Heracles). All the same, the historical significance of these myths remained uncontested in Greek culture. The factual existence of, e.g., the Trojan War or Heracles as basic data of Greek history was never doubted; and to that extent the Homeric epics, for example, were reckoned in their basic content as “true.”
The term myth acquired a new quality from the eighteenth century onwards (on this see Graf 1992). Starting with the German philologist Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729–1812), a “science of myth” developed, which has attempted, in repeated, novel approaches, to find in myth – the epics, tragedies and songs of the ancient poets were regarded as concretizations of the more general, authorless story on which each was based – the prehistoric forms and stages of human thought, whether it be that in myth developments in religious thought, fundamental cultural transitions (such as the process by which the human race became sedentary through agriculture) or historical memories are stored and worked through, or whether it be that myth records structures of an ancient (symbolic) type of thought. All these approaches to explaining myth have been repeatedly abandoned or presented anew in modified form. At the start of the twenty-first century it may be observed that this struggle to understand “myth” as a phenomenon has sparked important impulses for the development of the study of religion and culture. Admittedly, there is at present no clear consensus to which all would subscribe: there are broad definitions (myth as “traditional tale” [Kirk 1970]), but also more complex interpretations, such as that of Burkert (1979, 1998). Beginning from the comparative study of folk-tales, Burkert relates myths, like folktales, to particular narrative types, and sees in them programs of action which correspond to elementary cultural or biological human relationships. He regards myth and ritual as parallel: rituals are communications in the form of action, which help to shape or manage elemental human situations (such as killing and danger); myths name this kind of situation through language. Ritual, in its mode of action – which admittedly also only acts in play or in the mode of “as if” – can only take the situations up to a certain point, but myth, through the medium of language, in the form of “as if,” can allow the situation to become “mythic reality” (Burkert 1997, 39–45).
If we return from the problem of “myth” as a category to the issue of the relation between literature and truth, we may note that a series of modern approaches to myth have not seen it as a purely fictional occurrence, but have wanted to find in it a dimension of meaning of some kind, whether that be understood as cultic, linguistic–structural, historical or otherwise. From this position, one may speak of the “truth of myth.”
Burkert’s approach yields a new perspective on the question of the fictionality of at least those parts of Archaic literature that represent myths. For if the myths address elemental human situations in a comparable way to rituals, i.e. what in ritual is a threatening gesture or erotic hint is represented in stories as murder and love, then at the level of linguistic action there is an “as if” present which does not tie the meaning of what is represented to the condition of having actually taken place. The “truth” of myth would, on this approach, lie in its “anthropological content,” that is, in the fact that the narrated stories of myth allow people to develop and try out patterns of behavior which are comprehensible to them and which help them to deal with their world. If the meaning and function of myth in Archaic Greek culture is defined in this way, it becomes striking that the patterns of the myths are evidently tied to a specific cast of characters, who are not interchangeable and are firmly tied to specific elements of the action. The name Oedipus, for example, implies parricide and incest.9 On the other hand, it was evidently possible to extend the fixed sequence of actions externally or internally, that is, to expand the known story either by adding stories set before or after the known events, or to make changes within the story by adding new episodes or characters. The Iliad shows this in miniature. In Book 24 Priam visits Achilles by night in the Greek camp to receive the body of his son Hector for burial. In a moving scene, Achilles grants that the following morning Priam may return to Troy with Hector. Achilles even gives the enemy hospitality and invites him to eat with him. For this he must overcome Priam’s mourning, the rules of which include fasting. He attempts this in an unusual speech (24.599–620), in which he uses Niobe as a “mythological exemplum”: she too ate, even though she was mourning her six daughters and six sons, all killed by Apollo and Artemis. Niobe eating is a moment in this myth that is not attested elsewhere, and it may be supposed that the poet of the Iliad invented it especially for this situation in the tent of Achilles (Willcock 1964). It is worth noting that the Iliad at once acknowledges the “truth” of this new invention: Achilles’ mythological argument is successful and Priam allows himself to be persuaded to eat (24.627).
This passage expresses immanently in the text how an extension to a traditional myth functions: it requires a certain plausibility (Niobe’s eating is not implausible, given the length of her mourning period) to persuade the addressee (here Priam). As regards the external framework of communication, that is, the relation between the Iliad text, the poet and the recipient/reader, this means that the recipient of the Iliad must be inclined to accept the extensions or modifications made by the poet of the Iliad to the Trojan myth, that is, to accept them as “true.”
Admittedly the Niobe paradigm also demonstrates that this kind of truth was presented not as ontological but as persuasive: the recipient must be ready to be convinced. From this it may be inferred that this type of persuasive truth was only ever accepted if it met with a corresponding receptivity on the part of the recipient. To put it in more abstract terms: it was dependent on the horizon of the recipient. Such a horizon was of course neither synchronically nor diachronically unitary. There was no such thing as “the” Archaic, Classical or Hellenistic Greek. Rather, we should assume a broad palette of different horizons, which differed according to the social and geographical location of the recipient and which also shifted over the course of Greek cultural history.
An essential characteristic of Greek literary history, which has not yet been satisfactorily studied, is what we may term “the struggle for the truth.”10 If we work with the dichotomy formulated by Hesiod between “truth” and “lies,” which until Aristotle offers no place for the fictional as a distinct category, then every text or poet whose “truth” is no longer accepted, due to changing thought-worlds and experiences, could be accused of lying. It is evident that this fate can only be suffered by those texts which remained present in Greek culture over a long period, that is, texts that were transmitted through the medium of writing.11 The Homeric epics12 and Hesiod (by processes that are either unknown or the subject of scholarly controversy)13 achieved a canonical status early in Greek culture,14 so they were the principal fields (at least among those identifiable today) in which the struggle for the “truth” occurred. In the fifth century a famous dictum of Herodotus pointedly summarizes the significance of these poets: “For it was they (sc. Homer and Hesiod) who made the theogony for the Greeks and gave the gods eponyms, and defined their offices and skills, and showed their forms.” (2.53). It is at precisely this moment that the questioning of the “truth” of these poems begins. Already at the end of the sixth century Xenophanes of Colophon makes the following accusation: “Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods/ all sorts of things which are matters of reproach and censure among men:/ theft, adultery, and mutual deceit.” (DK 21 B 11, transl. Lesher 1992). Even though this famous fragment does not include the word “lie,” the flow of the text makes clear that this is what Xenophanes is implying about the gods represented by Homer and Hesiod. The “truth” of the eighth century thus no longer convinces someone like Xenophanes.15 The reasons for this may be seen in the creation of new discourses that are conventionally known by the modern term “Presocratic.” However, these new thought-worlds are themselves characterized by such major differences from each other that already in the ancient world it was possible to speak of three different philosophical schools: the Ionian (represented by Thales), the Italian (Pythagoras) and the Eleatic (Xenophanes).16 “A” new truth, which simply superseded the old one, was thus not able to come into existence, not least because the new philosophical truths on offer each contested the others’ validity. The concept of truth itself was a matter of controversy in this diversification of discourse: was it applicable solely in the context of logic (the ontology of Parmenides can be interpreted in this way), or must it remain indissolubly dependent on the thinking subject (as Protagoras’ statement that “Man is the measure of all things” can be understood)?17
A new dimension of experience opened up in Greek culture through intensified contact with other countries and peoples, a result of, among other things, the foundation of colonies abroad. From this, bodies of geographical and “historical” knowledge arose which founded new forms of literature in the medium of writing, such as geographic and ethnographic literature and ultimately the various stages of historiography. Here too the “ancient truths” were put to the test, for which different types of trial were applied. Thus at the start of the fifth century, in his criticism of the tradition Hecataeus of Miletus, the archegetes of historiography, was working with the criterion of “common sense” and of one’s own judgment: “Hecataeus of Miletus recounts (mytheitai!) the following: I write this as it seems true to me. For the stories (logoi) of the Greeks are many and laughable, as it seems to me.” (FGrHist 1 F 1). Herodotus, the “Father of History,” on the other hand, ostentatiously declined to establish the truth and instead set himself the task of collecting the various traditions (legein ta legomena, 7.152.3); Thucydides at the end of the fifth century developed a specific critical method of establishing “exactly” (akribes) what had happened (1.22) and assessed the “ancient” truths by the measure of probability (eikos).
The possibility of checking or testing thus became the central measure of truth, and no longer the authority of the person who announced it. Myth as elevated speech (a mode in which, as seen above, someone like Hecataeus still claimed to speak) had thus lost its universal significance as (sole) guarantor of truth. At around the same time as these new philosophical and historiographical discourses and their “new” rules, specialist sciences developed, especially medicine,18 the methodologies of which were also based on the principle of testing. Consequently, this pluralization of discourses and the establishment of the criterion of testing has been interpreted as characteristic of a major development in intellectual history, “from mythos to logos” or “from myth to reason” (thus Nestle 1940). This is too schematic,19 however, as the history of Greek literature continued to be shaped by working with myth.
One may even say that the competition between truths unleashed a force that was productive for those forms of literature that worked with myth. On the one hand myth was rescued “from the outside”: an attempt was made to save its truth-claim by a special kind of hermeneutics, the allegorical interpretation. Theagenes of Rhegion, a contemporary of Xenophanes, seems to have been the first to re-interpret the stories of the gods in Homer that had raised objections (such as the so-called theomachy in Iliad 23), defending their truth-content on the basis of a “secret meaning” (hyponoia) contained in the narrative.20 This gave rise to a tradition of interpretation that lasted throughout the history of the ancient world. Ironically, this tradition not only asserted the validity of Homer and Hesiod, but used their authority ever more intensively to support the allegorizing intepreter’s own specific doctrine, claiming that Homer had already formulated what that doctrine claimed. This was pursued with particular vigor by the Stoics (see Steinmetz 1986; Long 1992). For example, Cicero writes pointedly (De nat. deor. 1.41) of the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus that the latter had interpreted the depiction of the gods in the early Greek epics allegorically, “in order that even the most ancient poets … might seem to have been Stoics.” From the imperial period (see Dawson 1992) this type of Stoic allegory is preserved in the Compendium of the Tradition of Greek Theology of Cornutus (see Most 1989) and the Homeric Allegories of Heraclitus. From a systematic perspective, allegorical interpretation was an attempt to assign to poetry an unambiguously factual dimension;21 however, a specific truth of poetry cannot be reached through this form of hermeneutics.
Other ways of defending the meaning of poetry against the charge of lying were pursued by the poets themselves. Various strategies can be identified in the poetry of the fifth century. First, there is a clear tendency towards continuous modernization: the characters in the songs of poets like Pindar or Bacchylides, like those in the dramas of the tragedians, think, feel and act in the way that the fifth century considered plausible for human thinking, feeling and acting. Even though the terms used for mental or psychological activity in early epic (Jahn 1987; Clarke 1999) such as nóos or thymós reappear frequently, their meaning has nonetheless narrowed and shifted (Pellicia 1995). At the same time, mental or psychological processes are presented with much more nuance and tension. The result is that recipients of literature in the fifth century encounter in contemporary poetry mythical figures whose character does not seem outdated or incomprehensible. This continuous modernization becomes a feature of working with myth throughout the rest of Greek literary history and ensures that the processes of myth, which in principle belong to a remote period of time, remained continuously up to date and valid.
It must have been harder to deal with the Homeric–Hesiodic gods. The essential problem had been identified by Xenophanes. To solve it, the following procedures were deployed:
In sum, this type of continuous modernization allowed poetry not only to succeed in establishing a canon of poets and texts, but also to maintain its standing, for a broad educated section of Greek public life, as an authority that voiced valid truths and wisdom. Plato, for instance, continually has the characters in his dialogues cite poets to begin or support their arguments.25 Aristotle says in the Metaphysics (1, 995a7/8) that there are people who will only accept an argument if it is demonstrated by quotations from the poets (cf. Halliwell 2000).
In the discourses of the sophistic movement in the fifth century, two tendencies develop forcefully in the struggle for the truth of myth. On the one hand, myth is used for teaching purposes (which presupposes a didactic truth at least). Xenophanes had already insisted on the didactic function of early epic: “From the beginning, all have learned from Homer” (DK 21 B 10).26 This became more concrete among the sophists, in that they employed myth extensively for didactic purposes. However, the allegorical method of interpretation seems to be a necessary condition for this: Prodicus, for example, interpreted gods like Demeter or Dionysus as symbols for bread or wine (DK 84 B 5), and so behind the myth he created, of Hercules at the crossroads (DK 84 B 2), lies a symbolic meaning by which people are called to decide in favor of virtue. Gorgias, on the other hand, used myth as a repertoire of topics with which to demonstrate his rhetorical art (DK 82 B 11: Encomium of Helen; B 11a: Defense of Palamedes). This sophistic tradition is the background (cf. Reinhardt 1927/1966, 219–27) to Plato’s lavish use of myths (of his own invention); their role – generally speaking – is that positions which are developed by Socrates or other characters like Protagoras or Critias in the dialogues can be confirmed in the medium of myth (see Janka and Schäfer 2002, Partenie 2009).
The second tendency is to regard myth and the poetry that conveys it as the bearer of an ancient, primitive truth. Drawing on the past was a characteristic of Greek culture, as it was of the other cultures of the ancient world: the present was generally judged to be of lesser value than a (largely imaginary) past.27 The evidently greater age of, for instance, Egyptian culture therefore per se commanded the respect of the Greeks, as especially Herodotus shows (Book 2; see Burkert 2003, 79–106). It was thus easy to regard older Greek poetry, too, as the bearer of a higher wisdom (and truth) than the present. First steps towards this position were formulated by the sophist Hippias in the introduction to his Synagoge (see Patzer 1986), an encyclopaedic compilation (DK 86 B 6). He there declares that his doctrines offer a kind of synthesis of the wisdom of Orpheus, Musaeus, Hesiod, Homer and other poets, as well as Greek and “barbaric” prose authors. Beginning from here, a line can be drawn to Aristotle, who in the Metaphysics (12, 1074b1ff) describes myth as the presentation form (schéma) of the “ancients”: they used it to transmit their discoveries about the nature of the gods, and at the same time they found it an apt form for communicating to the “many” and for turning knowledge into laws. In this way Aristotle explains his own acknowledgement of the “truth” of poetry; however, this truth continues to be factual, as it refers to physical–philosophical “facts.” Myth is understood merely as a kind of archaic form of these truths. From here it is only a short step to assume generally that the older a text is, the closer it is to the truth or to wisdom, whether truth is here understood as logos revealed in the world, or whether the interest is in its closeness to a divine revelation (see Baltes 1999/2005). Consequently, Homer, Hesiod and the mythical singers Orpheus, Musaeus and Linus, who were regarded as even older, were understood as transmitters of wisdom that rivaled the Egyptian or “Chaldaic” (i.e. Babylonian) doctrines. Aristotle himself (in a fragment [F 53 Rose] of the lost Protrepticus, cf. Baltes 1999/2005, 17), however, seemed to regard these barbarian wisdom traditions as philosophy that was not yet completed – for him the completion was to come from Greek thought.
This figure of thought, of granting a special importance to age, was adopted by Jewish and then by early Christian thought and was used as an “argument from age”:28 insofar as Moses (and so the Pentateuch) was dated prior to the Trojan War in the chronologies current in the ancient world, he ranked as older than Homer. Jewish literature (including the Prophets) could thus be understood as a source for Greek authors down to Plato (who could have got to know it on his journeys to the Orient);29 Greek literature had thus gained access to the Judaeo-Christian revelation (which explained their convergence in certain views), but had in part misunderstood it (which explained the divergences).30 Judaeo-Christian literature was thus proved to be of greater value than Greek literature – that is, from this perspective, literature was assessed under the aspect of its (here, too, factual) truth-content. Within this principle of deep respect for the ancient, which is characteristic of the entire ancient world, Plato, and after him Platonism, holds a specially marked position.31 In Plato’s dialogue Ion, the divine inspiration of the poet (in the example of the rhapsode Ion) is acknowledged, but for Plato this does not lead to a specific truth of poetry. On the contrary: like every art, poetry is, as a form of mimesis, just as inferior to reality ontologically as reality is inferior to the world of ideas.32 Further, Plato repeats (in Rep. 2 and 3) the essential criticisms of Xenophanes’ polemic against Homer and Hesiod: “Hesiod and Homer and the other poets … composed false stories [muthous pseudeis], which they told people and are still telling them.” (Rep. 3, 377d4–6, transl. Gill). From this follow both the famous rejection of Homer’s poetry and the demand for poetry that is limited by censorship in Plato’s Republic. Plato, too, is thus a long way from recognizing a fictional dimension of poetry.33 This shaped the attitude of Platonism as a whole. Plutarch made the point sharply (De gloria Ath. 348a):
A myth aims at being a false tale [pseudes], resembling a true one;34 wherefore it is far removed from actual events, if a tale [logos] is but a picture and an image of actuality, and a myth is but a picture and image of a tale.
(transl. Babbitt 1936).35
If we summarize our findings so far about the discourse on the truth of poetry, what is glaringly clear is an insistence on the factual dimension of literature. Attempts to develop a concept of fictionality have not been found. They do exist, however. The most famous attempt at such a concept is found in chapter 9 of Aristotle’s Poetics. There it is said:
It will be clear from what I have said [sc. in ch. 7 and 8 on the form of a tragedy] that it is not the poet’s function to describe what has actually happened, but the kinds of thing that might happen, that is, that could happen because they are, in the circumstances, either probable or necessary. The difference between the historian and the poet … is that the one [sc. the historian] tells of what has happened, the other of the kinds of things that might happen. For this reason poetry is something more philosophical and more worthy of serious attention than history; for while poetry is concerned with universal truths, history treats of particular facts.
(transl. Dorsch)
The distinction made here by Aristotle between poetry and historiography may at first seem illuminating. However, it does not reflect the theory or practice of literature in the ancient world. For with few exceptions ancient historical writing did not tend to report “what really happened,” but began in the fourth century to aim systematically at emotional effects like those of tragedy; in addition, ancient historians collected an ever larger arsenal of topoi that they could deploy, for example, in accounts of battles or descriptions of cities and countries. Further, they often pursued polemics against each other and accused each other of “lying” (see Wiseman 1993). For example, Herodotus was explicitly called pseustes by Ctesias, a rival writing at the start of the fourth century (FGrHist 688 T 8).36 Similarly, poetry (and the non-factual forms of prose) did not gain much by Aristotle’s license (which was admittedly in part directed at Plato’s rejection of poetry). For, unlike in the system of rhetoric mentioned above, which recognized fictional narratives through the category of plasma, Greek literary criticism evidently remained stuck in the binary opposition of “truth–lies.” A distinct category for the fictive cannot be found in it. Paradoxically, this lack, too, released productive literary forces. For, if we look closely, we see that the concept of the lie already had its own special charm early in Greek literature. The speech of the Muses in Hesiod’s Theogony cited above is an important piece of evidence for this. For the Muses do not seem to regard it as an offense that they sometimes lie, but rather present this skill, even as a divine capacity of their inspiration. Accordingly, countless Greek texts present lying speeches as a special skill of characters in the text (cf. Bowie 1993; Fuchs 1993). Already in the Iliad none other than Zeus himself sends Agamemnon a “false dream,” which misleads the military commander into giving a deceptive speech to his army (which, as is well known, fails, Il. 2.111). The Odyssey is riddled with numerous deceptive speeches by the eponymous hero, with which he tries to deceive, among others, the goddess Athena (Od. 13. 256–86). The goddess naturally sees through the lie, but instead of being outraged she smiles and strokes Odysseus’s hand (Od. 13.287/88). She thus explicitly recognizes lying as a (positive) intellectual ability in her protégé. In tragedy, numerous plays (Soph. Ajax and El., Eur. Med.) work with the instrument of the lying speech, and so it is certainly not chance that the sophist and rhetor Gorgias attempts to appreciate the lie from the point of view of reception aesthetics – that is, the deception of the audience becomes a positive dimension. Gorgias, as Plutarch writes in De gloria Athen. (ch. 5, 348c = Gorgias VS 82 B 23) in the context of an appreciation of Athenian drama as “deception,” had said, “For he who deceives is more honest than he who does not deceive, and he who is deceived is wiser than he who is not deceived ....” (transl. Babbitt 1936). In nuce this presents a sketch – in the vocabulary of lies and deception – of the mechanism of a pact (cf. above) between the producer (= the deceiver) and the recipient ( = the deceived) of literature. Gorgias is thus making the attempt, in the face of the lack of terminology and of a concept of fictionality, to use the conceptual schemes available in his culture, namely truth and lies, to define fictional communication: as voluntary and transparent lying in which the recipient willingly allows the deception. Fictional communication is described with the term “lie” continually in Greek literature; there seems to have been a special charm in using the charge of moral misbehavior that always clung to the term pseudos to characterize fictionality as a paradox: Lucian, for instance, in Philopseudes (ch. 1) ironically problematizes the “remarkable pleasure people take in mendacious subjects.”37
The lie as mode of communication develops its own grammar as a literary procedure in the course of Greek literary history (though this has not yet been fully researched).38 Its elements include – paradoxically – the promise to speak the truth or, put more abstractly, an apparatus of authentification. “Lying tales” refer to their fictional status via their assurances that they are telling the truth, or by generous citation of sources and witnesses.39 If Plato sometimes gives his dialogues a concrete setting and cites his informants for what is recounted, in the imperial period this becomes an indication of the fictive quality of the discussion in question: “The philosophers thus lie about everything” concludes Athenaeus (5, 216c), pointedly referring to this dialogue framework. The Greek novel, too, sometimes makes use of the potential of this kind of authentification,40 and Lucian sketches in the introduction (ch. 1) to his “True Stories” (according to the author they can only be called this, because they admit from the start that they are lies) the dazzling play of texts that will sometimes arise as they deceive the reader with assurances of their truth (see Moellendorff 2000). In summary it can be concluded that the speech of the Muses in Hesiod’s Theogony, with its dichotomy of truth and lies, which is intended to characterize poetry (and literature as a whole), is even of symbolic significance for the whole of Greek literary history. As has been shown above, the “truth” of poetry is a problem that commands intense engagement from literary criticism and philosophy, and the concept of the lie as opposed to truth is used in long stretches of Greek literary history – from a modern perspective reductively – to describe and problematize everything in poetry or literature that cannot be classed as true in an ontological sense. The lie, we may conclude, is a central category of Greek literary aesthetics.
On “mythos” see especially Burkert 1979, on truth and lies see Gill and Wiseman 1993, Fuchs 1993; on fiction and fictionality Rösler 1980 and Hose 1996.