himself as a scholar of documentation "with all my rigor <for you>" (Oratio 41.2.13) Thucydides' principle. He also distinguishes between annals and documents that are within the historian's reach and things that fall outside his direct knowledge (Oratio ad Graecos 20.2), another of Thucydides' principles. He then accepts the caution of the Greek historians who rejected the mythological 'archaeology' with which the ancient ethnographers and historians (Titus Livy) had covered the dark path between the known facts and the legendary origin of each city or ethnic group. Another characteristic of the rigorous historian is the personal inspection of places and cities with the discernment of the various types of documentation and sources: Well then, all these things I do not expound because I learned them from another but because, traveling through many lands I have been a teacher of your own doctrines and have examined many arts and conceptions and finally I was able to study with attention the variety of statues brought by you to the city of Rome. For I do not seek to confirm my doctrines, as the vulgar do, with opinions foreign to my own, but 'I wish to compose anagraphs' (τὴν ἀναγραφὴν συντάσσσειν βούλομαι) on all those things which by myself I have understood (Oratio ad Graecos 35.1). What Tatian seems to propose is thus not a philosophy, theology, or exegesis of some revealed text, but a historical truth that attentive study can achieve. Nor does he do mythology because in impugning the mythologists as a whole, he uses an argument consonant with the critical historians: Greek theology is mythology, literary invention, with no content of truth. For the first time the voice μυθολογία appears in the Christian lexicon (Oratio ad Graecos 40.1); it specifically signifies the falsification of the philosophy of Moses perpetrated by the Greeks. Their poetry is shameful but, nevertheless, not false in an absolute way, because the 'gods' exist and act: they are the 'demons', who impinge on the deviation of human behavior and are the ones who manage the destructive and evil culture of the whole Greek παιδεία. Greek theology, then, is seen not as a praeparatio evangelica but as a degradatio mosaica, that is, as an imitative corruption of the writings of the Bible (40.1). Consequently he ends up sustaining several theses, the main one being that Moses is older than all the legislators and writers of humanity (31;