Cover -- Half-title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Preface -- Prologue -- The argument -- Approaches and methods -- Ancient and modern -- 1 Deception and the rhetoric of Athenian identity -- Honest hoplites and tricky Spartans -- Arguments from (national) character: Demosthenes' Against Leptines -- Symbolic sanctions: the law and the curse against deceiving the demos -- Staging Spartans and strategoi: Euripides' Andromache -- 2 Deceiving the enemy: negotiation and anxiety -- Vidal-Naquet, the ephebeia and military trickery -- Tricky Codrus: son of the 'Black Hunter' -- Military trickery as a negotiable term -- Deceit, fear and hoplite courage -- Working with children and animals: teaching deceit in Xenophon's Cyropaedia -- 3 Athens and the 'noble lie' -- Detienne and the 'masters of truth' -- Plato's pharmacy: the 'noble lie' in the Republic -- The 'noble lie' in democratic oratory -- Fiction problematised: religion as 'noble lie' in the Sisyphus -- War's first casualty: deception in Sophocles' Philoctetes -- 4 The rhetoric of anti-rhetoric: Athenian oratory -- Spin and anti-spin: rhetoric as the technology of lies -- Sophistry and logography, witchcraft and 'cleverness' in Athenian oratory -- Speaking democratically and the response of Plato and Aristotle -- The physiognomics of deception: Demosthenes' Against Stephanus 1 -- The lying topos: the orators deconstruct the commonplace -- Deceptive mimesis: 'lie detection' in Aeschines and Demosthenes -- 5 Thinking with the rhetoric of anti-rhetoric -- Primary Colors: metafiction and metarhetoric -- Who can you trust? Thucydides' Mytilenean debate and Aristophanes' Knights -- 'Trust me, I'm a comedian!' Aristophanes' Acharnians -- 'Men should have two voices': Euripides' tragedy of (anti-)rhetoric -- Postscript: the deceptive demos -- Epilogue -- Bibliography -- Index locorum -- Index.