Spiegare o mentire? Due vie della comunicazione politica in Tucidide

Abstract

Chosen as word of the year in 2016 by the Oxford Dictionaries, post-truth is a very recent neologism, spread on the wave of recent political events (particularly Brexit and Trump's election in 2016). What I would like to emphasise here is that post-truth, along with fake-news, refers to issues that are by no means new nor exclusively linked to modernity. I am referring in particular to the debate in ancient Greece on the relationship between truth and lies in political action and the relationship between 'fact' and the discourse that represents it (i.e. between ergon and logos).