Alexander Meeus Truth, Method and the Historian’s Character: The Epistemic Virtues of Greek and Roman Historians For good reasons the question of truth is one of the central problems in the theory and philosophy of history, 1 and it was an equally central question already in an- cient historiography. 2 In recent decades, however, several scholars have argued for a substantial difference between in ancient and modern understandings of historical truth, the former for instance being limited to impartiality and plausi- bility, or generally allowing for a much greater degree of – in our terms – subjec- tivity than would be acceptable nowadays. 3 The undeniable merit of these studies is that they have substantially enhanced our understanding of the often ne- glected differences between ancient and modern historiography. Yet it seems to me that some in turn understand the rhetorical and literary nature of ancient his- toriography in equally anachronistic and one-sided terms, 4 and often only in su- perficial engagement with recent insights developed in the theory and philoso- phy of history. Two central points in recent debates about history have been admirably sum- marised by Fasolt, namely that “our knowledge is linguistically constructed. But, far from making it unreal, that is what makes it knowledge”, 5 and that: || I would like to thank Aaron Turner having included me in his excellent conference, and the audi- ence at the conference, especially Katherine Clarke, Jonas Grethlein, Lisa Irene Hau and Jouni- Matti Kuukkanen for their valuable comments; translations of Greek and Latin texts are from the Loeb Classical Library, unless stated otherwise. || 1 See e.g. Lorenz 1998; Tucker 2004, 255–258 and passim; Murphey 2009; Pataut 2009; Kuukkanen 2015, esp. 113–192; Paul 2015, 111–122. 2 See among many others e.g. Marincola’s entry ἀλήθεια in the LHGL (Marincola 2007a), Gehrke 2014, 86–119 and passim, and two recent collective volumes: Ruffell/Hau 2017; Blank/Maier 2018. 3 E.g. Wiseman 1979; Loraux 1980; Woodman 1988; Nicolai 1992 and 2007; Heldmann 2011. 4 See e.g. the counter-arguments in Pelling 1990; Moles 1993; Rhodes 1994; Bosworth 2003; Schepens 2007; Lendon 2009; Schorn 2019. 5 Fasolt 2005, 10. As Lorenz 1997, 40, aptly put it in his argument against idealistic philosophies of history: ‘was erdacht wurde, ist ja nicht zwangsläufig fiktional oder imaginär’; cf. even Wise- man 1988, 263 about Thucydides: ‘Because he couldn’t be sure he got it right, it doesn’t mean he made it up.’ https://doi.org/10.1515/