the Persians that they allowed no place for the lie in their ethics[2] seems to indicate his apprehension of a higher standard of veracity than that which was generally observed among his own people.  Moreover, in the Iliad, Achilles is represented as saying:  “Him I hate as I do the gates of Hades, who hides one thing in his heart and utters another;” and it is the straightforward Achilles, rather than “the wily and shiftful Ulysses,” who is the admired hero of the Greeks.[3] Plato asserts, and argues in proof of his assertion, that “the veritable lie ... is hated by all gods and men.”  He includes in the term “veritable lie,” or “genuine lie,” a lie in the soul as back of the spoken lie, and he is sure that “the divine nature is incapable of a lie,” and that in proportion as the soul of a man is conformed to the divine image, the man “will speak, act, and live in accordance with the truth."[4] Aristotle, also, while recognizing different degrees of veracity, insists that the man who is in his soul a lover of truth will be truthful even when he is tempted to swerve from the truth.  “For the lover of truth, who is truthful where nothing is at stake [or where it makes no difference], will yet more surely be truthful where there is a stake [or where it does make a difference]; for he will [then] shun the lie as shameful, since he shuns it simply because it is a lie."[5] And, again, “Falsehood abstractly is bad and blamable, and truth honorable and praiseworthy; and thus the truthful man being in the mean is praiseworthy, while the false [in either extreme, of overstating or of understating] are both blamable, but the exaggerating man more so than the other."[6]

[Footnote 1:  Mahaffy’s Social Life in Greece, pp. 27, 123.  See also Fowler’s Principles of Morals, II., 219-221.]

[Footnote 2:  Hist., Bk.  I., sec. 139.]

[Footnote 3:  Professor Fowler seems to be quite forgetful of this fact.  He speaks of Ulysses as if he had precedence of Achilles in the esteem of the Greeks.  See his Principles of Morals, II., 219.]

[Footnote 4:  Plato’s Republic, II., 382, a, b.]

[Footnote 5:  Aristotle’s Eth.  Nic., IV., 13, 1127, a, b.]

[Footnote 6:  Ibid., IV.]

Theognis recognizes this high ideal of the duty and the beauty of truthfulness, when he says:  “At first there is a small attractiveness about a lie, but in the end the gain it brings is both shameful and harmful.  That man has no fair glory, in whose heart dwells a lie, and from whose mouth it has once issued."[1]

[Footnote 1:  Theognis, 607.]