For my ergon, I read an article titled The True, the False, and the Truly False: Lucian’s Philosophical Science Fiction by Roy Arthur Swanson that dived into Lucian’s potential intentions for writing True History. Swanson emphasizes that Lucian does not try to present the stories as true. Instead, he attempts to emphasize that the stories are “true to their fiction” (228) as opposed to the stories of philosophers, which are often presented as factual, making them more valuable. Furthermore, Swanson relates the way in which True History is a commentary philosophy to the way in which science fiction is a commentary on science.
Swanson notes that “Poets, historians, and philosophers who pass tales off as factual truth are false to their own modes of expression” (228), while Lucian makes no attempts to hide the fictional information in his works. Instead, Lucian tries to create entertainment that has the possibility of provoking thought, and his work serves to show that there is a clear difference between what one person thinks and what they truly believe. He does this by making the events in True History so outlandishly false that one cannot forget that it is not real. He even goes so far as to explicitly tell readers that all the events in True History are false. Swanson emphasizes this by choosing to refer to this work as True Tales, a name based of codices from the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, instead of True History, which comes from codices from the tenth and eleventh centuries, because the word ‘tales’ conveys Lucian’s intentions in English better than the word ‘history’.
Swanson also draws attention to the way in which the purpose of science fiction is to use fantasy to show the limitations of science. In the same way, Lucian uses satire in True History to show the limitations of philosophy in the ancient world. Both science and philosophy serve as ways of explaining and discovering the rules of the world, so it makes sense that both would be subject to critiques from people who do not work in those fields. To Lucian, some philosophy is overly focused on falsehoods without seeking to find the truth. Furthermore, Swanson notes that science fiction is often based on speculative science that is later shown to differ from real science. Lucian, on the other hand, only somewhat follows this model by trying to use his style of writing to convey his opinions on what he thinks philosophy should become instead of using the actual contents of the story to show what the world would look like if that method of philosophy was used.
Herodotus’ Histories plays into Lucian’s criticisms, exemplifying the critique that historians who tell falsehoods do not adequately represent their chosen method for expressing information. This becomes especially true when we consider that Histories is one of the main sources that we use for some of the events of that time, and he does not explicitly indicate which details are false, even if they are contradictory to information in his other works. This makes me wonder whether the term ἱστορίη did not have the same implications of finding truth that are present in the words ‘inquiry’ or ‘examination’ today. Even though Herodotus is not strictly a philosopher, many of the faults that Lucian finds with philosophers also apply to him, especially those that revolve around being self-serving as opposed to telling the truth. In addition, there are multiple stories embedded in the main storyline. While they are based on truth, Herodotus alters them in a way that promotes his own beliefs. One distinction Lucian makes between reading philosophy and entertainment is that philosophy prompts thought while entertainment leads to a “willing suspension of disbelief” (229). The main issue with Histories is that it attempts to present itself as entirely truthful, and the nature of the text can bring people to view it as entirely truthful without questioning the nature of the facts presented.
