Fictional Truth and Factual Truth in Herodotus

Ellis, Anthony (2016). Fictional Truth and Factual Truth in Herodotus. In: Hau, Lisa; Ruffell, Ian (eds.) Truth and History in the Ancient World: Pluralizing the Past (pp. 104-129). Routledge

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Herodotus’ relationship with truth and fiction has been contested since antiquity: was he ‘father of history’, as Cicero called him, or ‘father or lies’, as Juan Luis Vives claimed in the early sixteenth century, drawing on two millennia of strident criticism of Herodotus?2 This polarity has done much to obscure the role of ‘fictional’ narratives as a vehicle for philosophical and theological mediation in the Histories;3 fiction as moral and philosophical truth, in other words, rather than as lies.4 Despite the importance of this latter type of truth-creative ‘fiction’—in the Histories, Herodotus clearly sometimes conceives of fiction as factual untruth, and claims on a number of occasions that his own work has a greater factual reliability than that of other authors-most famously Homer-who allowed themselves poetic licence. In what follows, I look at how Herodotus adopts different narratorial personas that implicitly or explicitly alert the reader to the different types of ‘truth’ that the Histories contain, and how these different types of truth interact with one another.

Item Type:	Book Section (Book Chapter)
Division/Institute:	06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies > Institute of Classical Philology
UniBE Contributor:	Ellis, Anthony
Subjects:	800 Literature, rhetoric & criticism 400 Language 100 Philosophy > 180 Ancient, medieval & eastern philosophy
ISBN:	9780367871628
Publisher:	Routledge
Language:	English
Submitter:	Boschetti Anthony Ellis
Date Deposited:	06 Feb 2023 14:49
Last Modified:	06 Feb 2023 23:28
URI:	https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/178119