Fanfaron and impostor : the Greek origins of the charlatan

Abstract

Were the sophists, as Condorcet thought, the ancestors of modern charlatans, skilled rhetors who were enemies of the truth ? Or was Socrates himself, as Voltaire claimed, a bit of a charlatan ? To better understand the importance of the Greek precedent, this session proposes to explore the frontiers of knowledge by following the character of thealazōn , a type of comic theater, boastful and parasitic in Aristophanes, but also a bad doctor denounced in the Hippocratic corpus, and, later, towards the end of the IV^thcentury, an uncertain figure between boasting and deceit, symptomatic of an abuse of words and an increased commercialization of social relations. Thus, around thealazōn and the definitions ofalazōneia, we see the main characteristics of the charlatan, at the crossroads of learned imposture and self-interested deception.

The philosophers of the Enlightenment inherited from Greek philosophy and science a way of disqualifying opponents by accusing them not of being wrong, but of deceiving others. This polemical figure performs a socio-political function, disqualifying competitors, and an epistemological function, asserting a regime of good practice. But, like the charlatan, thealazōn is also a reversible accusation. He who denounces charlatans must, in turn, defend himself against being one, for intellectual authority is always subject to the test of the public.

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