The lie that tells a truth, the truth that lies

Lucian of Samosatas The Way to Write History is, on the one hand, a set of dos and
don'ts delineated to guide historians in their trade and, on the other, a text supposedly
representative of proper historiographical writing. In turn, The True History is meant to be a
parody of historical texts. A collection of the most unrealistic falsehoods an island with the
wine river, the land of the blessed, a whale entrapment, an oceanic chasm it purports to
evince what history is not and what fiction is.
Both texts seem thus, to perfectly inscribe into the truth-versus-lie debate of the postAristotelian age. However, a comparative analysis of selected fragments of the two texts
ones that reflect on Lucians basic notions of writing about the past, i.e. truth, historical
explanation etc. might demonstrate that the true and the false interweave in both texts. On
the basis of Aristotles definition of truth, J. R. Morgans concept of truth-fiction-lie triangle,
Hayden Whites theory of historical consciousness and Gadamers idea of the aesthetic
existence of the work of art, I would like to show how fictive elements in The Way to Write
History facilitate achieving the prime objective set for this text, i.e. truth giving, and how
factual elements in Lucians fiction lend it the truth quality. Altogether, the above is to give
grounds to the conclusion that fiction might be considered a necessary element and a
condition of the existence of historical texts.
Alicja Bemben is a PhD student at the Institute of English Cultures and Literatures at the
University of Silesia. Her research interests include philosophy of history, historiography
and writings of Robert Graves. She is a member of the Robert Graves Society and
participated, among others, in [Re]visions
of History in Language and Fiction, Robert Graves and Modernism, and TimeLing
conferences.