Lies and Fiction in the Ancient World

Abstract

This volume of specially written essays explores the understanding of the boundaries between fact and fiction, truth and falsehood in ancient Greek and Roman culture, and the relationship between ancient and modern thinking on this topic. Essays consider the extent to which the concept of fiction was explicitly defined in ancient critical, rhetorical and philosophical writing or was implicitly recognised even if was not explicitly theorised. A wide range of genres of ancient writing are discussed, ranging from Homeric epic, Hesiod, and archaic Greek poetry to Greek and Roman historiography, philosophy (especially Plato), and the Greek and Roman novels or prose fictions. In ancient historiography, stress is laid on the combination of an explicit aspiration to factuality with a strong implicit element of creativity or inventive elaboration, extending in some cases to sheer lying. Essays discuss also especially the kind of ‘make believe’ or fictive belief invited by the ancient novels and the interplay between the ‘story world’ of the novels and the real world shared by its readers and author. Another area treated is the ethical value (or disvalue) of fiction and the question whether fiction is valued in the same way in antiquity as in the modern world. Although antiquity differs from the modern world in not defining fiction as such or in producing a literary theory of the novel, it is suggested by some essays that ancient and modern attitudes to fiction and its value are not as dissimilar as this difference might lead one to expect.