"Feintise ludique et non pas leurre. Lire Dictys de Crète à la lumière de la paideia"
Résumé
The aim of this paper is to compare two extracts from the Ephemeris belli Troiani (3.15 and 6.5) with the ancient scholia to Homer and with the Troika composed by historiographers. I intend to show that Dictys Cretensis (re)uses ancient debates about the status of poetry in order to reconstruct a Trojan War that seems likely or credible (pithanon) to his readership. Nevertheless, this complex interaction with a whole historiographical and exegetical tradition invites the readers not to take the text seriously and to approach it with a critical mind. This attitude has already been programmed by the prologue, which presents itself as a fake: we cannot decode the tricks of Dictys’ text without considering its intellectual context. In this sense, we can define the interaction between the Ephemeris and its readership as a prototype of the fictional pact: a connivance is supposed to link the two. If such a conclusion is correct, the text emerges as a ludic exercise that can be compared to the more sophistic(ated) games of Dio of Prusa (Or. 11) and Philostratus (Heroicus).