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.]
Pindar looks toward the same standard when he says to Hiero, "Forge thy tongue on the anvil of truth;"[1] and when he declares emphatically, "I will not stain speech with a lie."[2] So, again, when his appeal to a divinity is: "Thou that art the beginning of lofty virtue, Lady Truth, forbid thou that my poem [or composition] should stumble against a lie, harsh rock of offense."[3] In his tragedy of the Philoctetes, Sophocles makes the whole play pivot on the remorse of Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, over his having lied to Philoctetes (who is for the time being an enemy of the Greeks), in order to secure through him the killing of Paris and the overthrow of Troy. The lie was told at the instigation of Ulysses; but Neoptolemus repents its utterance, and refuses to take advantage of it, even though the fate of Troy and the triumph of Greek arms depend on the issue. The plain teaching of the tragedy is that "the purposes of heaven are not to be served by a lie; and that the simplicity of the young son of truth-loving Achilles is better in the sight of heaven, even when it seems to lead to failure, than all the cleverness of guileful Ulysses."[4]
[Footnote 1: Pythian Ode, I, 86.]
[Footnote 2: Olympian Ode, 4, 16.]
[Footnote 3: Bergk's Pindar, 183 [221].]
[Footnote 4: Professor Lamberton]
It is admitted on all hands that the Romans and the Germans had a high ideal as to the duty of truthfulness and the sin of lying.[1] And so it was in fact with all peoples which had any considerable measure of civilization in former ages. It is a noteworthy fact that the duty of veracity is often more prominent among primitive peoples than among the more civilized, and that, correspondingly, lying is abhorred as a vice, or seems to be unknown as an expedient in social intercourse. This is not always admitted in the theories of writers on morals, but it would seem to be borne out by an examination into the facts of the case. Lecky, in his study of "the natural history of morals,"[2] claims that veracity "usually increases with civilization," and he seeks to show why it is so. But this view of Lecky's is an unfounded assumption, in support of which he proffers no evidence; while Herbert Spencer's exhibit of facts, in his "Cyclopaedia of Descriptive Sociology," seems to disprove the claim of Lecky; and he directly asserts that "surviving remnants of some primitive races in India have natures in which truthfulness seems to be organic; that not only to the surrounding Hindoos, higher intellectually and relatively advanced in culture, are they in this respect far superior, but they are superior to Europeans."[3]
[Footnote 1: See Fowler's Principles of Morals, II., 220; also Mahaffy's Social Life in Greece, p. 27. Note, for instance, the high standard as to truthfulness indicated by Cicero, in his "Offices," III., 12-17, 32. "Pretense and dissimulation ought to be banished from the whole of life." "Reason … requires that nothing be done insidiously, nothing dissemblingly, nothing falsely." Note, also, Juvenal, Satire XIII., as to the sin of a lie purposed, even if not spoken; and Marcus Aurelius in his "Thoughts," Book IX.: "He … who lies is guilty of impiety to the same [highest] divinity." "He, then, who lies intentionally is guilty of impiety, inasmuch as he acts unjustly by deceiving; and he also who lies unintentionally, inasmuch as he is at variance with the universal nature, and inasmuch as he disturbs the order by fighting against the nature of the world; for he fights against it, who is moved of himself to that which is contrary to truth, for he had received powers from nature through the neglect of which he is not able now to distinguish falsehood from truth.">[
[Footnote 2: History of European Morals, I., 143.]