Maud W. Gleason From: James Porter, ed. Constructions of the Classical Body (University of Michigan Press, 1999) 287-313. Truth Contests and Talking Corpses This essay is an attempt to learn about truth from fiction. It takes as its point of departure a cluster of motifs that appears, with intriguing permutations, in diverse second century stories. 1 In each case, the general narrative pattern is as follows: two parties with competing claims to truth hold a formal contest in a public place where, after a series of abrupt reversals, the issue is finally decided by the evidence of a dead, mutilated, or resurrected body. The appearance of this cluster is not something to be explained away in purely literary terms. If Mary Douglas’ claim has merit, and “the social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived,” 2 we can ask these corpses to tell us about the ways Roman society constructed truth. Furthermore, can we learn from the abrupt reversals in these narratives anything about the way Romans experienced shifts in truth-paradigms in “real life”? (This is, of course, a question of paramount importance for appreciating the religious change propelled by Christianity). The tales about truth-contests with which we begin come from Apuleius’ Golden Ass and the Acts of Peter, a second-century work of hagiography in the New Testament Apocrypha. From these frank fictions we turn to a later sub-literary text that purports to be the stylized script of two typical criminal trials in the “real world.” This document provides material for speculation on the functional meaning of truth in a society that practiced judicial torture. Do the dizzying shifts of truth-paradigms experienced by the reader of fictional truth-contests provide some sort of commentary on the experience of the those who watched the enforcement dramas of the Roman criminal justice system in real life? Then we interrogate a conservative educator to find out how paideia, the traditional training of the educated elite, might be implicated in these constructions of truth by torture. The letters of Synesius of Cyrene, a well-groomed product of the paideia system who became a bishop, provides us with some aperçus about the relationship of truth to power, and we end with some thoughts about continuity and change in the social construction of truth between the “pagan” second-century and the “Christian” fourth. The subject under discussion is narrative patterns that are (I will claim) as much socio- cultural as literary. We will take hold of the literary end of the stick first, however, and begin with some story-telling. The Tale of the Lovesick Stepmother The world of the Golden Ass is the imaginative analogue of a pinball machine. The institutions of society are the fixed plastic pathways, while paranormal transformations and 1 An earlier version of this paper was delivered in 1994 at the Tenth Quinquennial Congress of the Féderation internationale des associations d’études classiques (FIEC) in Québec. I would like to thank the participants at that congress, as well as Peter Brown, Joan Burton, Robert Kaster, Jim Porter, and Susan Stephens for their suggestions and criticism. 2 Natural Symbols (New York, 1970) 65.