Truth and Personal Agreement in Archaic Greek Poetry: The Homeric Hymn to Hermes

Abstract

Did archaic Greek poets think that speech should be factually informative? Studies in the "history of thought" suggest that archaic culture offered no developed alternative to the opposition of truth to falsehood judged in relationship to fact. But the mythic poems display more interest in person-to-person agreement than eye-to-object fidelity. This is seen in the numerous stories where partnerships are negotiated and symbolized through tokens whose impersonal value is flagrantly disregarded. In the Hymn to Hermes , facetious non-truths establish intimacy and cooperation among those who understand them.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 19 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.