Odiseo Sertorio. Entre tuertos y ciervos

In the literature of antiquity, we can find clear examples of writings in which the fantastic acquires the validity of historical fact. In this paper we will focus on a series of episodes from Plutarch’s Life of Sertorius in order to show how certain concepts prior to the actual narration of the facts, considered historical, influence the way of conceiving the facts to be narrated, and the very meaning of the story being told, clearly affecting the biographical genre, but also on the way of conceiving ancient historiography, and consequently, even on our current perception of past events, which were probably clearly fantastic and exempla motifs for the ancients, but have been validated as possible and real by our contemporary colleagues.