The Concept of News in Ancient Greek Literature

Raquel Fornieles

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9783111022956
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The concept of news that we have today is not a modern invention, but rather a social and cultural institution that has been passed down to us by the Greeks as a legacy. This concept is only modified by the social, political, and economic conditions that make our society different from theirs. In order to understand what was considered news in Ancient Greece, a lexical study of ??????? and all of its derivatives attested in a representative corpus of the period spanning from the second millennium BC to the end of the fourth BC has been conducted. This piece of research provides new contributions both to studies in Classics (there are hardly any studies on the transmission of news in Antiquity) and in journalism. This study also reveals an interesting point: the presence of false news – similar to current fake news – in ancient Greek literature, especially in tragedy and historiography when it comes to the use of the derivatives of ???????.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• 1 Homer: The Iliad and the Odyssey
• 2 Greek Lyric Poetry: Pindar and Bacchylides
• 3 Tragedy
• 4 Aristophanic Comedy
• 5 Historians: Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon
• 6 Greek Oratory: Isocrates, Lysias, Aeschines and Demosthenes
• 7 Fake News
• 8 Conclusions
• General Index
• Index Locorum