Manufacturing Elephants: Technologies of Knowledge in Theatre History

Abstract

The only point that all extant classical historians seem to agree upon is that most prior classical historians were liars, some more preposterous than others, but most at some point succumbed to the seduction of the fabulous and the incredible. The marvellous accounts of the ‘dog-headed men who bark and feed on birds’, ‘men called Monocoli [single-legged] who run without standing nimbleness by hopping on their single leg’, ‘men who have no necks and eyes in their shoulders’ that Aulus Gellius found in the old papyrus rolls of Ctesias were the quintessential damnation of the historian: ‘Greek books full of wonders and fables.’¹ Two historians, in particular, were singled out for the height of their tall tales, both fifth century bce writers, Herodotus and Ctesias. In a fit of bad humour, Lucian lists Ctesias first among the liars he banishes to the purgatorial island of evil winds: ‘The people who suffered the greatest torment were those who had told lies when they were alive and written mendacious histories, among them were Ctesias of Cnidus and Herodotus and many others.’² Strabo considered the same two historians as ‘writers of myths’ and concluded, ‘one could more easily believe Hesiod and Homer in their stories of the heroes than Ctesias, Herodotus, Hellanicus, and other writers of this kind.’³

The lies those old Greek historians got away with!

Juvenal, Satire x, 70