Deceit in Herodotus’ Histories
An Anthropological Perspective
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21780002 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Anna Polishchuk (0000-0001-6953-2935, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Issue | 40 |
| Pages | 84-92 |
| Publication date | 2026-05-31 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Bulletin of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv Literary Studies Linguistics Folklore Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1728-2659 • E-ISSN: 2709-8494 |
| Publisher | Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (PUBLISHER • UA) |
| DOI | 10.17721/1728-2659.2026.40.12 |
| OpenAlex | W7163403924 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 16 |
Background. Deception plays a pivotal role in Herodotus' Histories, yet the conceptual boundaries of lying and related practices remain insufficiently defined. The objective is to reconstruct Herodotus' conception of deceit by determining both how and under which circumstances speakers mislead and how rhetorical strategies and cultural models of truth and falsehood shape moral judgment and determine the lexical choices of the narrator and his characters. In particular, this study examines how deceptive actions are lexically encoded, narratively framed, and culturally evaluated across Persian, Egyptian, and Greek contexts. Methods. The research integrates three approaches: (1) a logical-semantic analysis, combining cognitive and corpus‐based methods with semasiological and onomasiological procedures to map the Greek lexical field of deceit; (2) a narratological and discourse‐centered analysis, distinguishing explicit and implicit deception at the character and narrator levels; identifying ideological and other pragmatic implicatures; and (3) a cross‐cultural anthropological approach, using focused case studies to situate deceptive speech and behaviour within Persian, Egyptian, and Greek cultural frameworks. Results. The findings demonstrate that Herodotus' vocabulary of deceit is systematically calibrated rather than uniform. Persian and Egyptian episodes are framed through lexemes with strongly negative moral connotations (διαβαλ‐, δολ‐), reflecting relevant culturally grounded expectations. Greek episodes, by contrast, employ more pragmatically flexible or less negatively marked terms (μηχαν‐, σοφ‐), aligning deception with communicative ingenuity, political dramaturgy, or socially negotiable forms of persuasion. A narratological analysis reveals how identical deceptive structures – such as the disguising and swapping of identities – receive divergent moral valuations depending on narrative status, speaker identity, and the cultural semantics of truth. Conclusions. Herodotus' concept of deceit emerges as a context-sensitive construct, shaped by lexical nuance, discourse-pragmatic strategies, and culturally specific ideologies. Greek deception appears as primarily verbal, sophisticated, and socially acceptable, whereas Persian deception is portrayed as morally charged and often non-verbal in nature. Thus, this multi-layered analysis reveals how Herodotus' Histories encodes not only various mechanisms of misleading action but also the different anthropological grammars of truth and un-truth in an ancient Mediterranean context
Deception · Ideology · Lying · Narrative · Rhetorical question · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Rhetoric and Communication Studies
Lying Without Saying Something False? A Cross-Cultural Investigation of the Folk Concept of Lying in Russian and English Speakers
Lying between English and Chinese
Anthropomorphism, Theatre, Epiphany
Herodotean Inquiries
Lying and Misleading in Discourse
East is East and West is West - Or Are They? National Stereotypes in Herodotus
Are the concepts of truth and lying shared across cultures
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |