Everyone who tells a story about themselves will tend to invest it with a self-interested slant. When pushed, it may veer into fabrication — the pellucid definition given by the philosopher Bernard Williams of a lie as “an assertion, the content of which is made with the intention to deceive the hearer with regard to that content”.
Lying is a species of rhetoric that runs through the history of civilisation up to the advent of modern “fake news”, and as such deserves to be catalogued and memorialised. Such, at any rate, is the philosophy behind the creation of a new museum in the Italian hamlet of Le Piastre. The village has a reputation as the repository of unlikely stories and has held an annual lying competition since 1966. The institution includes such exhibits as water from the Great Flood, the die cast by Julius Caesar in crossing the Rubicon and a plane ticket issued to Christopher Columbus in hastening his passage to the new world.
The villagers have grasped that there is an aesthetic quality to the spinning of tall tales, and it’s an art worth celebrating. Even so, its earliest practitioners knew the difference between gospel and guile and the sometimes embattled distinction between them.
Herodotus, known as the father of history, was accused by Cicero of faking his account of how Croesus of Lydia consulted the oracle at Delphi before making war on Persia. Medieval myths such as the visit to Glastonbury by St Joseph of Arimathea have been sedulously promoted by hucksters to fleece the faithful. Until, in modern times, outright cheating for malign purposes — denial of documented genocides — has become a threat to human welfare. The imagination has prompted great discoveries, but its greatest fruit is science and rationality, whose methods check extraordinary claims.