Torture and Truth

Abstract

The ancient Greeks routinely tortured slaves to extract evidence for legal trials. They considered truth obtained from slaves by torture to be more reliable than the freely-given testimony of free men. This text questions whether recollection of this fact is merely a curiosity that allows us to marvel at our progress from the past, or whether our very idea of truth, the truth of the philosophical tradition founded by the ancient Greeks, is caught up in the logic of torture, in which truth is conceived of as residing elsewhere, requiring violence if necessary for its production. Examining ancient Greek literary, philosophical and legal texts, the author analyzes how the Athenian torture of slaves emerged from and reinforced the concept of truth being repressed.

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