The Oldest Deception ― When Did Humanity Begin to Deceive?

The act of deceiving has a history older than writing itself. Trapping prey, misleading an enemy’s eye, telling a lie to an ally — such cunning was likely honed as a survival skill long before humanity had words. Deception was a tool of survival before it was ever a vice. Yet when civilization arose, when people looked up to gods, obeyed authority, and began to trade with strangers, deception too grew into more complex and far grander forms. The world history of fraud quietly began the very moment human beings gained the power to believe.

The Voice of the God, and Those Who Listened

For the people of antiquity, to know the future was the dearest of all wishes. Would tomorrow’s battle be won? Was it safe to set out to sea? Would a child be granted? The answers to such questions were believed to be relayed by the ‘oracle,’ which conveyed the words of the gods. Among the most renowned was the sacred site of Delphi, at the foot of Mount Parnassus in Greece. Said to lie near the very center of the Greek world, it was called the navel of the world, and pilgrims came from far and wide to hear the oracles spoken by Pythia, the priestess of the temple of Apollo.

Generals brought their strategies, rulers their questions of colonization, merchants the fortunes of their trade, all to this sacred place. The words of the oracle were often delivered in a suggestive form that could not be read a single way, it is said. An answer that could be taken either way is hard to be proven wrong however events turn out, and easy to make seem true in hindsight — later generations have found here the prototype of a mechanism that skillfully leads people to believe. And yet, many who gathered at Delphi came in pure faith, and it cannot simply be branded as fraud. The history of the oracle teaches us that the power and the peril of believing are inseparably bound together.

What matters here is that for deception to work, the skill of the deceiver alone is not enough. Unless there is, on the side of the listener, a wish to believe, no words hold any power. The desire to know the future, to be saved, to avoid loss — these natural human wishes are the very foundation of deception, unchanged from antiquity to this day.

The Serpent God, and a Single Man

As time went on, in the second century when the Roman Empire blanketed the Mediterranean, a figure who would leave his name to later ages appeared in a town in Asia Minor called Abonoteichus. This man, named Alexander, is said to have raised up a new god in the form of a serpent called Glycon, and to have opened its oracle. Seeking the words of the god he proclaimed, people gathered from across the Mediterranean world, and the cult is said to have spread widely. By one account, the number of oracles ran to an enormous figure, with a fitting fee paid for each question, it has been reported.

That this episode is known in such detail today is because the contemporary satirist Lucian left behind a work titled ‘Alexander the False Prophet.’ Lucian harshly criticized this cult, charging that the god’s true form was a living serpent fitted with an artificial head, and that the voice said to be the god’s was produced by a contrivance. Lucian is said to have held strong hostility toward Alexander, and some caution is needed as to how far his account can be taken at face value. Even so, the very structure — borrowing the name of an authoritative god to gather people’s faith and their fees — illustrates one archetype of deception that would appear again and again in ages to come.

What is worth noting is that this cult is said to have drawn in not only simple folk but also people of standing. The wise and the high-ranking are not necessarily harder to deceive. If anything, the more convincing the guise of authority, the more readily people entrust themselves with ease. The tale of Glycon tells us that trust in authority itself can, at times, become the doorway to deception.

The Wisdom to Guard Against Lies Was Old, Too

That the history of deception is old means the wisdom to guard against it is old as well. Ancient societies were by no means left forever defenseless against deceit. Many civilizations, from early on, defined false testimony and broken promises as crimes, set witnesses at the scenes of trade and judgment, and built systems to record contracts. The more the act of deceiving spread, the more the devices to prevent and punish it grew as well. The deceiver, the deceived, and the one who seeks to see through the deception — the history of fraud has advanced as a contest among these three.

The existence of writers like Lucian is one such device. The fact that he exposed a false prophet shows that even then there were eyes that doubted clever faiths and oracles, and sought to see through their workings. Wherever there was deception, there was always a voice seeking to expose it. This very tension is the essence of the history of humanity’s dealings with lies.

And in time, the age would reach a great turning point. In place of the guise of faith, of gods and oracles, a new authority would come to seize people’s hearts. It was the power that sought to unravel the mysteries of nature through reason and experiment — what would later be called science. Those who promised to turn base metal into gold, and proclaimed they could cure every illness. Next time, we trace the tale of early-modern deception that beguiled people wearing the guise not of faith, but of science.