Aletheia (mythology)
Aletheia ( Greek Ἀλήθεια "truth") is the goddess of truth and daughter of Zeus in Greek mythology . According to Plutarch , she was the nurse of Apollo .
According to a fable of Aesop , Prometheus made her out of clay, but before he had given her life, Dolos , the personified deceit, formed a figure completely identical to her, except that the clay was no longer sufficient for the feet. When Prometheus saw the two figures, he was amazed at the resemblance and enlivened both, whereupon the real truth walked away measured, the image of deception also arose, but did not move.
In Roman mythology it corresponds to the Veritas . This is the daughter of Saturnus , or of "Tempus", the "time", Greek Chronos , which again corresponds to Kronos and thus Saturnus.
The nuda veritas , the proverbial “naked truth” , appears in the Carmina of Horace . In antiquity, on the other hand, she seems to have mostly been depicted in white clothing. This is also the case in an ancient painting that Flavius Philostratos describes. Its subject is the dream oracle of the Amphiaraos at Oropos . Aletheia, dressed in white, stands next to the gate of dreams and thus shows that the sleeper will find the truth in dreams at this oracle site.
After Claudius Aelianus the chief of Egyptian judges wore around his neck a character from Sapphire , the Aletheia was called.
Modern reception
Heinrich Julius zu Braunschweig and Lüneburg (1589–1613) coined the Truth Thaler in 1597 and 1598 with a saying on the front and the personified "naked truth" on the back.
The Nuda Veritas appears as an allegorical figure in the famous painting The Defamation of Apelles by Sandro Botticelli . The painting is based on a description of a painting by the Greek painter Apelles that was handed down by Lukian . At the end of the 19th century Gustav Klimt took it as a symbolic figure in some of his works of art.
literature
- Fritz Graf : Aletheia. In: The New Pauly (DNP). Volume 1, Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-476-01471-1 , Sp. 452.
- Ernst Heitsch: The Non-Philosophical ΑΛΗΘΕΙΑ. In: Hermes . Vol. 90, 1962, pp. 24-33.
- Wilhelm August Roscher: Aletheia . In: Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher (Hrsg.): Detailed lexicon of Greek and Roman mythology . Volume 1,1, Leipzig 1886, column 229 ( digitized version ).
- Salvatore Settis : Aletheia . In: Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae (LIMC). Volume I, Zurich / Munich 1981, pp. 486-487.
- Konrad Wernicke : Aletheia . In: Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Antiquity Science (RE). Volume I, 1, Stuttgart 1893, column 1371.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Pindar , Oden 10, 4 and Fragment 205.
- ↑ Plutarch, quaestiones convivales 3, 9, 657e.
- ↑ Aesop, Fables 530.
- ↑ Plutarch, quaestiones Romanae 11, 267e.
- ^ Aulus Gellius , Attic Nights 12, 11, 7.
- ^ Philostratus, imagines 1, 27.
- ↑ Aelianus, varia historia 14, 34 (online) .
- ↑ Lukian, de alumnia 2.
- ↑ Against Klimt: Fallen many are bad. Article of the courier, May 12, 2012; Nuda Veritas, Gustav Klimt. Article on the website of the Austrian Theater Museum .