"A Rhetorical Trojan War: Philostratus' Heroicus, the Power of Language and the Construction of the Truth"
Résumé
Although the characters of Philostratos’ Heroikos claim to tell the ‘true’ version of the Trojan War, a close study of the compositional techniques used in the text shows that this alter-native story of the Homeric poems and the Epic Cycle is mostly based on rhetorical categories, such as likelihood (εἰκός), possibility (δυνατόν) and non-contradiction. This article aims to ex-plore this polemical relationship to archaic poetry by comparing the argumentative techniques of the Heroikos with the exercise of contestation (ἀνασκευή), as it is defined in the Progymnasma-ta. Unsurprisingly, Philostratos chose the Trojan War to do so: no ancient writer doubted its historical reality, but it was taken for granted that Homer and the poets of the Epic Cycle distort-ed it for poetic reasons. In this sense, we can identify in the Heroikos a questioning similar to Gorgias’: what can λόγος say about a fact whose reality is unattainable?