Throughout our semester we navigated conversations about race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, humor and storytelling. We grounded our discussions in two primary texts: Lucian’s True Histories and Herodotus’ Histories. Both authors grapple with the truth as they work to balance their conceptions of the world and the past. However, their opines regarding the truthfulness of their narratives greatly differ. Lucian acknowledges his fallacies. His literary objective was to expose authors who paraded their narratives as the truth. Thus, he constructs an absurdly exaggerated to parody the travel accounts of Herodotus and Homer. Lucian’s portrays a fantastical trip to outer space and more specifically, the moon, the furthest place in the classical imagination. Whereas, Herodotus establishes himself as an ethnographer of sorts, the first of his kind. By inquiring into the Persian Wars, he constructs his version of history or his interpretation of the truth, a version, which he claims is objective to preserve the past. Herodotus and Lucian work in contrast with one another and approach the truth from drastically different angles which shapes the nature of their writing and overall interpretation.
Herodotus asserts that he is capturing the truth. However, his removed position poses challenges to the accuracy of his writings. When he writes his history, he makes his own way with Homer as a source of inspiration, but in my opinion not technically a predecessor for this type of narrative. Herodotus did not observe or experience these battles and we are unfamiliar with how he acquired his information. His positionality gives him the liberty to write about other less relevant subject matter. Additionally, as one of the first in this genre, he does not have to comply with organizational structures or rules. For example, he incorporates his opinions into his chapters and spends more space writing about civilizations of interest e.g. Egypt. His addition of clearly fictional stories, e.g. Adrastus and Croesus, further muddles the truth. While the truth is of great importance to the integrity of Herodotus’ claims it does not undermine the quality of the stories themselves. Regardless of if the Histories are truthful, they remain captivating and provide a glimpse into parts of the past.
Alternatively, Lucian is quick to refute the truth of his writings. He owns up to his fiction and criticizes his predecessors for their supposed “objectivity.” In Lucian’s mind, it is more admirable to admit to biases and extrapolations than lie about telling the truth. He expands on his criticisms by constructing his narrative in the style of a history with clear allusions to Herodotus and Homer. While the majority of his narrative is clearly fiction, there are portions of his story that allude to the truth and comment on very real aspects of society, e.g. Lampopolis. In doing so, Lucian adds complexity to his writing and further confuses the readers interpretations of his works.
