Misinformation, Disinformation, and Propaganda in Greek Historiography

Thomas Figueira, Rosaria Vignolo Munson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9781350358737
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Greek Ancient History
• Index: History

Mindful of the present state of discourse on ancient Greek historiography, this edited volume explores the major themes of pursuing factuality, managing witness/source bias, falling into historical error and creating or confronting propaganda. Even the greatest ancient historians, striving for factuality and truthfulness, must commence from subjectivity. Their works, when studied closely, reveal biases and conceptual or ideological distortions – their own and others'. For this reason, Misinformation, Disinformation and Propaganda in Greek Historiography strives to evaluate the issues which stand in the way of factuality in historical texts and records.

The contributors, all experts in the field, explore and question the accuracy of the historiography in question; the ancient author's fidelity to their sources; and the evidence presented in relation to inherited oral traditions. In this way, an ancient author's methodology is evaluated in terms of its probability, the awareness of its cultural variation and the influences which we can deduce within the texts. This volume presents an important contribution to the study of what constitutes fact and fiction within ancient Greek historiography.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Herodotus
• 1 A Different Debate among Herodotus’ Persians: On Truth and Falsehood
• 2 Misinformed Rivals: Agonistic Intertextuality and Hypoleptic Discourse in Herodotus
• Part II: Thucydides
• 3 Lies and Liars in Thucydides
• 4 Disinformation, Especially Spartan, in Thucydides’ Account of the “Ten Years War”
• 5 Alcibiades: Secrecy, Private Initiative, and Disinformation
• 6 Thucydides 2.8.1–5 and the Psychology of Ideological Sympathy in Fifth-Century Interstate Politics
• 7 Propaganda in the Periclean Funeral Oration?
• Part III: Xenophon and Early Fourth-Century Historiography
• 8 Kritias of Athens and Oligarchic Propaganda in Late Fifth-Century BCE Athens
• 9 Xenophon’s Partisan Account of the Thirty
• 10 Klearkhos the Cheat or Klearkhos the Warmonger? Xenophon’s Silence on Spartan Deception in the Anabasis
• Part IV: Hellenistic Historiography
• 11 The Herophilos Hypothesis and the Hairy Heart of Aristomenes of Messene
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index Locorum
• General Index
• Copyright