Introduction: Fake News <i>in</i> or <i>as</i> Invective in Ancient Texts and Contexts

Fake news—also known as information disruption—is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “news that conveys or incorporates false, fabricated, or deliberately misleading information, or that is characterized as or accused of doing so,” with the aim of deceiving multiple audiences and interpretive communities (e.g., a lively audience or readership), attacking individual or collective targets, altering perceptions of people, events, and circumstances, manipulating decisions, and making personal, political, or other profit. There are three forms of the concept: misinformation (false information disseminated with the aim of deceiving the target audience or elevating the status of the disseminator), disinformation (false information disseminated with the aim of causing harm to the target audience), or mal-information (true information deliberately disseminated to affect and harm others).The term “fake news” has a rather modern semantic cachet and a short-lived history. Its coining dates to the late 18th or early 19th century. It is primarily associated with attempts to explain natural phenomena (e.g., the Catholic Church's explanation of the Great Lisbon Earthquake in 1755) and with the rise of yellow journalism, which involved spreading lies about the world (e.g., the “Great Moon Hoax of 1835,” which appeared in a newspaper, The New York Sun, with stories about extraterrestrial life on the moon) and presenting unreliable, distorted, exaggerated, or completely fictitious scandalous stories. In today's world, fake news is ubiquitous at all levels of life, permeating interpersonal and interstate affairs, religious affiliations, and other aspects of cultural activity: from political forgeries, smears, and spin to (yellow) journalistic fraud, social hoaxes, and even the fabrication of anti-COVID vaccination myths and the spread of unsubstantiated claims about war events in Ukraine and Gaza. Fake news, fueled by emotional appeals, is used excessively when it comes to persuasion. For example, when the British were faced with the decision to remain in or leave the European Union, both the pro-EU and Leave campaigns were accused by the other side of spreading lies about the dangers and prospects of the UK with or without EU membership.1Despite the contemporary coining of the term “fake news,” the practice of articulating and disseminating lies is hardly unknown in Greek and Roman antiquity, from the Homeric period onwards. Διαβολή (“slander”), κακηγορία (“public insult”), the art of ὀνɛιδίζɛιν (“reviling”), and συκοϕαντία (“sycophancy” or “malicious accusation”) are some of the terms used to describe the proliferation of unsubstantiated claims about events, (groups of) individuals, and/or ethnic/civic and cultural collectives. Modern studies extensively discuss the interplay of truth and lies, political propaganda, and posthumous mythologizing in shaping our understanding of important historical figures;2 the (lack of) reliability and veracity of the information contained in genres, especially those aimed at recording past events (like oratory and historiography);3 the factuality and historicity of entire texts (especially Plato's Apology of Socrates,4 but also the surviving writings of the Ten Attic Orators);5 and deception, falsehood, and impersonation that may take various forms (e.g., nonverbal, as in the bodily acts of smiling or crying).6Fake news as such is rarely discussed in ancient studies; the most comprehensive discussion is a 2025 collection of essays edited by Diego De Brasi, Amphilochios Papathomas, and Theofanis Tsiampokalos and titled Fake News in Ancient Greece: Forms and Functions of ‘False Information’ in Ancient Greek Literature. The collection is invaluable in clarifying the meaning and semantic cachet of the term “fake news” in modern and ancient textual and contextual traditions and examining its application in representative examples of ancient genres. Further detailed discussion of at least some aspects of fake news in various ancient contexts can be found in chapter 7 of Raquel Fornieles's 2022 book, The Concept of News in Ancient Greek Literature. Fornieles discusses specific cases and examples of false news—ψɛυδαγγɛλία—and suggests that this is analogous to the term for fake news in antiquity. Ian Worthington also looks at fake news in Attic oratory in his article, “Fake News: The Greek Orators’ Rhetorical Presentation of the Past.”This special issue adopts Worthington's broad definition and understanding of fake news: fake news, as discussed in the articles in this special issue, is intended to refer to any distortion of the truth found in ancient Greek and Latin literature that aims to alter perceptions by attacking and discrediting its targets. The focus is therefore on the still little-researched use of fake news as a means of articulating invective, i.e., attacking and discrediting the identities of individuals or civic/cultural communities. Invective is a violent attack on a person's identity, an attempt to portray the “self” or “self-disclosing” characteristics in the most damning way, a deliberate attempt by one person to undermine, diminish, stigmatize, and destroy the perception that others have of another person.The topic of this special issue—how fake news is used in ancient literature to articulate attacks against individuals or communities—is only sparsely and fragmentarily studied in classical scholarship,7 perhaps because it is a Herculean task to uncover forgeries in ancient texts and restore the truth. But the whole endeavor is not unattainable: by using ancient texts together with material evidence and modern theories and research tools that draw on multiple disciplines, as some of the contributions to this issue do, it is possible to reconstruct a picture of how reliably ancient sources convey information about historical figures and events.Andreas Serafim's contribution to the recently published volume on fake news, “As in a Game of Minesweeper: Fakeness, Imprecision, and Truth about the Body in Attic Oratory,” is exemplary for the discussion of fake news as invective.8 Attic oratory offers information about the past whose accuracy is at least questionable. Given the manipulation of evidence by the orators for rhetorical purposes and the lack of extra-rhetorical sources for the stories presented in the speeches, it is very difficult to ascertain the truth. This is what is called a “minesweeper's game”: we never know where the bomb of untruth or inaccuracy lies. This paper examines ancient texts by drawing on insights from modern interdisciplinary studies (i.e., archaeology, osteopathology, ophthalmology, and sociology) to explore this game of falsity by examining stories that focus on the depiction of rivals’ bodies to test them for accuracy. One story relates to the depiction of Timarchus in Aeschines 1 as being “in a hideous and disgraceful physical condition” (26), “painful in appearance” (61), and “past his prime” (95); another has to do with Demosthenes's claims in 11.22 and 18.67 that King Philip of Macedon was severely wounded in a series of battles. It is argued that the portrayal of both Timarchus and Philip in the speeches of their political rivals is precarious, to say the least, in terms of veracity. The particular arguments are, firstly, that Aeschines discarded the option of a somatically attractive κίναιδος (“passive homosexual partner” or “effeminate man”) in favor of an overtly more dissolute body image and that the body and general stature of Timarchus were still attractive; and secondly, that other textual material from the time of Demosthenes indicates that his descriptions of Philip II's injuries are, at the very least, exaggerated, and serve the aim of conveying the image of a ruthless or even psychotic leader who wanted to “establish a despotic empire over all Greece” (Dem. 18.66). The methodology employed in the study and the means of discussing the two case studies on fake news and invective create a framework for analyzing further features of the topic in different genres and textual traditions.This special edition is the first systematic study of fake news as or in invective. It cannot credibly pretend to be an exhaustive discussion of such a complex and multi-layered topic. But it is the first step forward that will stimulate further scholarly research on the topic. Each of the articles in the special issue focuses on the study of a particular topic and discusses it in depth. It provides a model of thinking and a methodological pattern for the study of fake news in/as invective that could help readers and researchers find the appropriate tools for the features of this topic in other texts and clarify a whole range of issues that might arise in the analysis. The research is endless. Where you think there is only one path to follow, you realize that there are many more. It is not possible to follow them all at once. What you can do is invite others to follow in your footsteps, show them where the paths you have found are, and allow them to find their own. It is to be expected that multi-disciplinarity will also increase the importance of the constructive “wayfinding” that this special issue is intended to encourage. The special issue is aimed not only at classicists and ancient historians, but also at scholars of body culture research and anyone interested in the arts of speaking, communicating, performing, and persuading.The analyses in the special edition focus on the following overarching thematic categories: (1) sexuality, body, and corporeality (as in the contribution of Sarah Cullinan Herring); (2) fake news about historical events and political circumstances (Giuseppe La Bua), especially in times of crisis (Raquel Fornieles); (3) religiously orientated fakery and invective (Donald Lateiner); (4) fake news and invective in scientific thought and practice (Alberto J. Quiroga Puertas); and (5) forgery and invective in genres and texts (Laurens E. Tacoma).Sarah Cullinan Herring's article begins by noting that Lucian presents his hetairai as vulnerable to male violence by emphasizing the physical precariousness of their labor and the social and financial risks they face on a daily basis. The vulnerability of Lucian's hetairai is compounded by the ubiquitous use of various forms of fake news, both oral and written. The role of gossip and lies is explored through Dialogues of the Courtesans 2 and 11, showing how untrue oral communication is deliberately used to exert power and dominance. Written fake news is then considered in an analysis of Dialogues of the Courtesans 4 and 10. It is established that Lucian presents written (and in these cases, false) invective as a destructive means of character assassination. The theme of fake news in Lucian's text thus creates an unstable world of fickle and uncertain communication, where a few words, written or spoken, can spell financial, physical, and emotional ruin for a hetaira. Meanwhile, the men who employ them remain largely materially and emotionally unscathed, highlighting the gendered nature of this type of communication.History is written by the victors and for the victors. This general statement explains the ubiquitous presence of fictitious “pseudo-historical” figures in late antique historical narratives, epideictic texts, and biographies, in which fakeness, as a manipulative reproduction of events, is part of the rhetorical and political background of the text's composition. In this perspective, forgery also becomes an exceptional means of vilification in the hands of talented orators and writers who offer a falsified image of the usurper emperors labeled as tyrants in order to discredit them and, in contrast, celebrate the memorable achievements of the legitimate emperors. This paper examines the combination of fakeness, invective, and politics in the collection of the Panegyrici Latini and the imperial biographies known as the Historia Augusta. It is shown that forgery plays a key role in the subjective, often ideologically-oriented reconstruction of historical events in the later Roman Empire by the panegyrists and imperial biographers, who were obsessed with the spectrum of civil war in times of political and economic crisis. By revisiting the portrait of the usurper in the Panegyrici and in the Historia Augusta, this paper considers forgery as a non-negligible aspect of the structural pattern of imperial praise and biography alongside the limits of historical reliability.In ancient Greek literature, there is clear evidence for the existence of fake news, which is spread to create disinformation and achieve certain goals in times of crisis. These messages—reminiscent in some ways of today's fake news—were deliberately created and disseminated to deceive the enemy, mislead, manipulate decisions, and even gain personal, social, or military advantage. A lexical approach leads us to the noun ψɛυδαγγɛλία, the specific term coined for the transmission of false (fake) news. However, the term appears only once in a fascinating passage in Xenophon's On the Cavalry Commander. Its occurrence in this single text is remarkable given the importance Xenophon attached to lying as a perfect strategy of war and a means of intimidating enemies. This article examines other ways of referring to fake news and focuses on its importance as a powerful tool of invective in times of crisis. Particular attention is paid to two closely related contexts, the military and the political sphere.Lucian the sophist wrote an epistolary essay that condemns the spiritualist Alexander of Abonuteichos for criminal fraud, social and sexual self-aggrandizement, and sexual mischief first among his native Paphlagonians and then far beyond in second-century Roman Anatolia. Both men prospered by their verbal agility and daring performances. Both succeeded remarkably in the imperial oikoumene. They competed for attention with contrasting worldviews. Alexander's strategies of persuasion began with divine miracles and prophecies but extended to a campaign of disinformation about and invective against his foes (Epicureans, Christians, and Lucian, inter alios). Lucian, in the name of philosophical truth, employs similar tropes, exposing a snake with a puppet's humanoid head, the prophet's lavish lifestyle and a dubious murder plot against the fearless Lucian, and the feckless belief among his followers. Both men present themselves as devoted expounders of differing realities. We must find Alexander, however, almost entirely through this bemused Lucian whose invective only sees positives in Alexander when they serve to convict him of superior hoodwinking.This article examines the role that fake news, understood as a form of invective, plays in the work of the physician Galen of Pergamon. The article focuses on his autobiographical works for two reasons: firstly, given the huge volume of Galen's work, it is necessary to create a closed corpus. The second reason is the difficulty of making a clear distinction between the personal and professional dimensions of Galen's texts, since his public image depended largely on the interaction between his professional and personal ethos. By examining Galen's autobiographical writings through the lens of invective, the article analyzes the extent to which, in the invectives he wrote against those who criticized his methods and medical approaches to health and disease, Galen followed the conventions of ψόγος (“blame”; “reproach”) previously established in rhetorical treatises like Aristotle's Rhetoric or Quintilian's The Orator's Education. It then considers how the inclusion of fake news in these writings helped Galen amplify his invectives and how this fake news could, if possible, be labelled as “strategies for ψόγος” according to ancient rhetorical and literary categories. The article concludes with an assessment of how the combination of ψόγος and fake news helped Galen to advance his agenda in the competitive world of the imperial pepaideumenoi.While this volume is dedicated to fake news in/as invective, this contribution shows that the reverse situation also occurs in our ancient sources: there are fictional texts in which invective plays a major role. Tacoma argues that these occurrences have a direct impact on our understanding of the nature of ancient fake news. The paper analyses the invectives contained in a series of documents commonly referred to as the Acts of the Pagan Martyrs or, more formally, the Acta Alexandrinorum. These Acta consist of—usually quite fragmentarily preserved—papyri that report on confrontations between Roman emperors and members of the Alexandrian elite. They are set in different historical locations of the early imperial period, but the narrative structure is roughly the same in each case. One or more members of the Alexandrian elite appear as ambassadors before the emperor. Something always goes wrong at the meeting, and once the Alexandrians and the emperor exchange increasingly outrageous insults, the ambassadors are taken away to be executed. The Acta are written in the form of court reports. However, while normal court reports are always written in documentary script, the Acts are written as a literary manuscript. This, combined with the fact that their content is highly sensational, reveals their fictional status.Tacoma goes into more detail about the invectives of the Acta. Modern fake news often uses emotionally charged language and makes sensationalist claims. The moral outrage and negative emotions these claims evoke provoke a strong reaction and thus increase their spread. However, wild stories do not only attract attention. They also aim to reveal underlying truths about the outside world that have been deliberately hidden. The claims are not subject to normal verification processes, but operate at a deeper, intuitive level; they confirm rather than challenge pre-existing beliefs. All these elements explain why invective plays such a prominent role in the Alexandrian Acta.