ABSTRACT
The topic of truth in ancient historiography is certainly complex. Although the historians’ claims that they will report or stick to ‘the truth’ may seem at first hand banal, on closer inspection, it appears that the search for the truth as a historical principle is far from simple or uncontroversial. Many issues arise that deserve exploration. What did ancients (in our case, ancient Greeks) understand by the term ‘truth’? Which terms did they use to convey its meaning and with what nuances? To what is ‘truth’ opposed? Is it opposed to ‘lies’ or rather to ‘fiction’? Finally, to what extent is the search for the truth a distinctive trait of historiography that would differentiate it from other genres, e.g. poetry or oratory?
