Truth and History in the Ancient World

Lisa Irene Hau is Lecturer in Classics at the University of Glasgow, UK. She has published articles on Greek historiography, moralising and narrative technique, and she is working on a book on moral didacticism in Greek historiography. She is co-editor of Beyond the Battlefields: New Perspectives on Warfare and Society in the Graeco-Roman World (2008).Ian Ruffell is Lecturer in Classics at the University of Glasgow, UK. He is author of Politics and Anti-Realism in Athenian Old Comedy: the Art of the Impossible (2011) and Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound (2012).

• Preface AbbreviationsList of Contributors1. Introduction Ian Ruffell and Lisa Irene Hau2. The Challenging Abundance of the Past: Pluralising and Reducing in Pindar’s Victory SongsJan R. Stenger3. Tragedy and FictionalityIan Ruffell4. Seventeen Types of Ambiguity in Euripides’ Helen Matthew Wright5. Multiple Ways to Access the Past: the Myth of Oedipus, Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Herodotus' Histories Catherine Darbo-Peschanski6. Fictional Truth and Factual Truth in Herodotus Anthony Ellis7. Se non è vero: On the Use of Untrue Stories in Herodotus.Katharina Wesselmann8. Intertextuality and Plural Truths in Xenophon’s Historical NarrativeEmily Baragwanath9. Ctesias of Cnidus: Poet, Novelist or Historian?Alexander Meeus10. The Aesthetics of Truth: Narrative and Historical Hermeneutics in Polybius' HistoriesNicolas Wiater11. Truth and Moralising: the Twin Aims of the Hellenistic HistoriographersLisa Irene Hau12. Alexander and the Amazonian Queen: Truth and FictionJoseph Roisman13. Lucian on Truth and Lies in Ancient Historiography: the Theory and its LimitsMelina TamiolakiIndex

"Different stories have always been told about the past, and ancient writers knew it. Could these stories all be true, or true in the same way? Did writers of history see truth in the same way as philosophers or poets or dramatists did, or as we do? Those are the questions that this collection of outstanding essays explores, and fundamental issues of fictionality, of genre, and of truth itself are illuminated along the way."- Christopher Pelling, University of Oxford, UK"The various contributions of this book on the status of reality and truth in history among the ancients demonstrate that there was not one possible approach, and that each literary and methodological genre proposed solutions that still question modern researchers."- Antonio Gonzales, ISTA/Université de Franche-Comté (Besançon), France, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2017