Contents -- Introduction -- Proem -- 1. Before Being or Not-Being Was: Logos and Logic Among the Preplatonics -- The Preplatonic Logos -- The Poets' Deceptions: Poiesis, Pseudos, and Apate -- Preplatonic Rhetoric: Sophists or Statesmen? -- 2. Rhetor and Eiron: Plato's Defense of Dialogue -- Writer, Rhetor, Eiron: The Sophistic Teachings -- Plato's "True Rhetoric": Dialogue -- Dialogue and Dialectic: The Philosopher as Sophist -- 3. Aristotle: A Logic of Terms, a Rhetoric of Motives -- The Rationale: Divide and Preserve -- From Categories to Koinoi Topoi: Of Words, Sentences, Proofs, and Arguments -- The Institutionalization of Rhetoric -- The Aestheticization of Irony -- 4. Cicero: Defining the Value of Literacy -- Hermes and Janus -- From Diegesis to Narratio: Rhetoric and History -- The Case Against Technical Rhetoric -- Those Contentious Greeklings and Their Probabilities -- 5. When the Rhetor Lies: Augustine's Critique of Mendacity -- Anatomy of a Conversion: Rhetorician, Manichean, Academic, Platonist, Catechumen, Bishop -- Of Signs, Signification, Literary Lies, and Rhetorical Fables -- To Use Language to Lie Is a Sin -- 6. Inscriptions of Self and the Erasure of Truth -- Being Talk Deceives -- Literary Fiction, Rhetorical Lie, and Logic as Illusion -- Reinscribing the Self -- Hidden Truth and Hidden Meaning -- Epi Dia Logos -- Notes -- References -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- V -- W -- X.