Engraved on the mantel near Stephen Colbert’s interview platform in The Colbert Report studio were three Latin words: VIDERI QUAM ESSE (to seem rather than to be). The mantel framed a fake fireplace whose electric flames flickered falsely, simulating an atmosphere of warmth and coziness while Colbert interrogated his guests. His ostensibly classical catchphrase, championing the seeming over the (f)actual, suited his “fake” news show and on-air persona to a (non-silent) ‘t.’

Why “ostensibly” classical catchphrase? The Latinity of videri quam esse makes it seem a saying of ancient origins, when it is the reverse of one. Videri quam esse is an inversion, a perversion, even, of an anthem— esse quam videri (to be rather than to seem) — native to discussions in ancient Roman texts about the sights and sounds of virtue and the troubling matter of those who fake them. The form of Colbert’s phrase deftly performs its own content.

An early guess from fan communities was that Colbert flipped esse quam videri because it is the state motto of North Carolina, and he so proudly hails from South Carolina. A better hunch connects it with Colbert’s “truthiness” (and its synonym, “veritasiness”), used to describe that which is self-evident and sourced in the gut. “Truthiness,” which featured on the debut episode of The Report on October 17, 2005, quickly entered the English lexicon. Feisty and zeitgeisty, “truthiness” indicted those who are “all fact, no heart” and identified the “divi[sion] between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart” as “what’s pulling our nation apart today.” Colbert’s examples of truthiness in action were President George W. Bush’s Supreme Court nomination of the vastly unqualified Harriet Miers two weeks before The Report premiered and Bush’s gut-based pursuit of Saddam Hussein in 2003: “And what about Iraq? If you think about it, maybe there are a few missing pieces in the rationale for war, but doesn’t taking Saddam out feel like the right thing?” Colbert did not coin “truthiness.” According to the OED, it is of nineteenth-century vintage, and originally meant “truthfulness.” Colbert inverted the definition of and popularized an old word.

Videri quam esse, also old and inverted, obviously did not attain the same popularity, but it was and remains a subtle cultural commentary with a hefty philosophical and rhetorical history. Though The Colbert Report is now nearly two years defunct, this reversed re-emergence of esse quam videri invites inquiry into some phases of this phrase. After all, since the 1960s, an overvaluation of authenticity and sincerity has pervaded discourse pertaining to self-presentation and the assessment of the self-presentation of others. It even has played a determinative role in the dynamics, if not the outcome, of recent presidential elections in the United States.

Esse quam videri is a fragment of a larger phrase: it is better ‘to be rather than to seem’ virtuous. In the truncated form, virtue has fallen out. Here lies one key difference between “being” and “seeming” in the thought-worlds of pre-modernity versus those of modernity and post-modernity: that we have undergone a shift or even a rift in concern from identifying authentic virtue to identifying authenticity itself. Authenticity has become a virtue, the virtue, even.

Certain ancient figures associated with esse quam videri are well known for their resistance to the falsifying, ingratiating tendencies of certain types of rhetoric. Yet many also recognized that being virtuous was insufficient without also seeming and being seen as virtuous, and that one way to develop and display virtue was through speech. That is, they worried that broadcasted virtue might be only show, but they also worried that virtue that was not publicized, made public, seen and heard by others, shared with others, was of little social or civic worth.

Though esse quam videri is obviously Latin, it enjoys an extensive earlier history in Greek texts. As with so many ancient things, it is evident as an attitude (if not an actual quote) in Homer’s Iliad, when Achilles responds to Odysseus’ wily attempts to soothe him (9.308–314).

The ancient Greek equivalent of esse quam videri — usually articulated in the negative as ou dokeīn all’ einai (not to seem but to be) — first appears in Seven Against Thebes, Aeschylus’ tragedy about the conflict between Oedipus’ sons, Eteocles and Polynices. One of Polynices’ warriors, a seer from Argos called Amphiaraus, is a “most sound-minded man” (568), who rebukes the rising battle-frenzy of his fellows and implores Polynices not to proceed with an attack on his native city. Unlike the elaborate shields of his comrades-in-arms, Amphiaraus’ simple bronze shield boasts no swaggering signs or symbols (591), “for he does not wish to seem, but to be the best [ou gar dokeīn aristos, all’ einai thelei], as he harvests his mind’s deep furrows, from which his careful resolutions emerge” (592–594). Amphiaraus cares more for the slow process of deliberation than the quick flash of ostentation, for depth than surface, for the generative than the destructive.

The Amphiaraus-applied line from Seven Against Thebes appears in both Plato and Xenophon. In the second book of Plato’s Republic, Glaucon, Adeimantus, and Socrates discuss justice and injustice (361aff). Unconvinced of Socrates’ unconventional position that just people live more happily than unjust ones, Glaucon and Adeimantus outline the popular position that unjust people prosper. To make their stances as starkly different as possible, Glaucon asks Socrates to imagine a wholly unjust and wholly just person. The former figure commits the utmost injustices but enjoys the utmost reputation (doxa) for justice. Though he is nimble and sly, if he does trip up, his persuasion, forceful manliness, friends, or money set everything aright. Glaucon even reckons that Aeschylus’ description of the generative furrows of Amphiaraus’ mind applies more aptly to the perfectly unjust person, since that person would be forever augmenting his position and possessions.

On the other hand, the perfectly just person would be “a simple and high-born man, who, to quote Aeschylus, does not wish to seem but to be good [ou dokeīn all’ einai agathon ethelonta]. Then we must take away the seeming. For if he seems [doxei] to be [einai] just, then he will have honors and gifts because others think him to be [dokoūnti … einai] that way. It is unclear in that case whether he is just for justice’s sake or for the sake of the gifts and the honors.” He would have, instead, a reputation (doxa) for gross injustice that he would never disavow, even under threat or endurance of abuse, torture, or death. How could such a person be happy? The whole conversation moves around concepts in the dok- family: dokeīn (to seem), doxei (he seems), dokoūnti (they think), and doxa (seemingness, opinion, reputation). The way one seems to others, again and again, results in one’s reputation. If one is not seen to be — that is, does not seem to be — a certain way, then one will not be thought to be it.

In Plato’s Gorgias as well, Socrates parades his claim that only the just person is happy. In the final portion of the dialogue, he insists that rhetoric should be a tool for exposing rather than concealing one’s deficiencies in virtue. Only then can they be corrected. He adds: “that above all things a man should take care not to seem to be but to be good in private and in public [pantos māllon andri meletēteon ou to dokeīn einai agathon alla to einai, kai idiai kai dēmosiai] […] and that all flattery [pasan kolakeian], with regard to both oneself and to others, to few or to many, must be fled; and that rhetoric is to be used this way always, for the sake of the just, and the same goes for every other activity” (527b-c).

For the Socrates we encounter in the Gorgias (and elsewhere, too), to maintain goodness both in small conversations and mass communications seems to require dialectical and rhetorical preparations. Given the temptation to “give into the crowd,” be it of 3 or of 3,000, to flirt and to flatter, that is no easy task. Socrates constantly tests himself, talking to anyone and everyone.

During an encounter dramatized by Xenophon in his Memorabilia, Socrates chats about friendship with a young man called Kritobolos (2.6). Their earliest agreement is that the best kind of friendship is that which blossoms between good people. Socrates gives Kritobolos a short if not simple answer to the question of how one signals goodness so as to attract good friends: “the shortest, surest, and best way, if you wish to seem good, is to be good [suntomōtatē to kai asphalestatē kai kallistē hodos … ho ti an boulēi dokeīn agathos einai, toūto kai genesthai agathon peirasthai]” (2.6.39). Socrates presumes that one who is — that is, one who has worked at being good — will seem good, that true goodness will make itself readily apparent without being appearance-only.

The Roman engagement with “being/seeming good” emphasizes that the distinguishing virtues of good people come to be and come to be seen during encounters with others. Esse quam videri first appears in Cicero’s De Amicitia (On Friendship, §98) and in a slightly different form in De Officiis (On Duties, 2.43–44). Cicero grapples with the visibility of virtue and the troubling matter of those who fake its signs.

The central issue animating De Amicitia is how to distinguish a flatterer from a true friend, a challenge whose oratorical implications serve as analogies for Cicero’s interpersonal focus. Laelius, the speaker, advises a group of young listeners about the sincere free speaking that is essential to friendship and the sickly sweet talk that degrades it. The latter, simulatio, “is not only vicious in all matters, because it adulterates truth and takes away our ability to judge it, but also especially repugnant in friendships; for it utterly destroys truth, without which the name of friendship can have no substance” (92). To distinguish a true friend requires the same quality one uses to distinguish the “sincere and true” in other areas of life: diligence (95).

Laelius assures his charges that “a public assembly, composed of inexpert men, can, nevertheless, usually spot the difference between a popularis, that is, a conniving, superficial citizen, and one who has constancy and truth and weight” (95). Differentiating a fake friend from a good and true one during the preliminary stages of an interpersonal relationship should not, therefore, be difficult. He warns of people who prefer to have only a reputation for virtue, sighing that “many wish not so much to be as to seem to be endowed with virtue” (98). Such people wander far from Xenophon’s Socrates and his view that the most direct path to seeming good is being good.

Cicero, though, knows that line well. In book 2 of De Officiis, he cites it, but he opts to add to it: “that we may easily be seen/seem to be [esse videamur] — and in this itself [that is, being] there is the greatest power — that which we wish to be held to be [haberi velimus], however, some instruction should be given.” Cicero does not take for granted that those who are good will seem that way to others. His advice includes attention to image-management and how to amplify virtue and correct vice across a wide spectrum of communicative activities (talking, walking, buying a house). Such activities offer to scrutinizing others opportunities to wonder about who we are and whether we are what we seem to be. What we do and how others view our actions can threaten the seeming self we are invested in maintaining and which, Cicero stresses, is less difficult to maintain when it is who we really are.

Esse quam videri appears again in the Bellum Catilinae of Sallust. Its rhetorical and moral motion turn on competing speeches by Caesar and Cato the Younger on the appropriate punishment for the conspirators (§54). Following their speeches, Sallust interjects with an assessment of their respective characters and reputations. Caesar makes grand gestures and pursues high-risk, high-glory opportunities to display his virtue and virtuosity. However philanthropic he may be, his flamboyance suggests that unbecoming character traits motivate him. Cato, by contrast, is unyielding, and utterly uninterested in being a focal point of fame. “Cato’s zeal inclined toward modesty, decorousness, and, above all, severity … He preferred to be rather than to seem good [esse quam videri bonus malebat]; thus, the less he sought glory, the more he was stalked by it.” I would argue that Cato did care, though, about how he appeared to others. He had a distinctive look, and it communicated his unassailable virtue. The moralizing poet Horace, writing decades after Cato’s suicide, mocked those who thought resembling Cato’s visage made them Catonian in virtue: “What? If someone, with a grim and wild look and bare feet / and a thinly-woven toga, copied Cato, / would he thereby represent the virtue and habits of Cato?” (Epistulae 1.19.12–14). In this way, the thread of esse quam videri runs through both the mantle of Cato and the mantel of Colbert.

Colbert’s VIDERI QUAM ESSE critiqued the culture of knowing — that is, the norms or habits through which a collective negotiates questions of essence and appearance — that arises from the overvaluation of authenticity. Ancient Greek has a complex vocabulary with which to describe what sorts of knowledge result from a person or polity’s management of the relationship between being and seeming. I see three such knowledge concepts at play in Colbert’s critical reversal of esse quam videri: epistēmē, complete knowledge; gnōsis, recognition or acknowledgment; and doxa, which commonly appears in verb form in the ancient Greek equivalent of esse quam videri, and signifies seemingness, opinion, or reputation.

The epistemic critique in “to seem rather than to be” mocks the assumption that “seems to me” equals “to be.” “It seems to me” too often enjoys the weight of expert testimony, no matter the referent of “me,” or, worse, it has an ontological unassailability. Even so, in an environment of truthiness, a substantively epistemic appeal to facts is seldom a move that trumps. Facts require a supplement — their contextualization or articulation in hallowed cultural language or in a profound personal narrative — to be most effective.

The gnostic critique, on the other hand, embraces the seeming, by tempering the obsession with knowing — definitively — who others are and who we ourselves are. Even “being” requires flexibility. Gnōsis is perhaps most well known for its presence in imperative form in the Delphic injunction “gnōthi seauton” (know yourself) that inspired Socrates’ self-scrutiny. Gnōsis implies familiarity rather than mastery. It is not invasive, but neither is it superficial. When we insist on knowing others in a totalizing way, we force false performances. Every complexity is seen as a lack of integrity, which is a standard of indivisibility difficult to satisfy. It pushes being into seeming.

To see the doxastic critique means taking videri quam esse seriously as a collective charge: when it comes to questions of value and meaning, seeming is all we have. It returns knowing to the realm of the social, to the “seems to us.” This is, of course, a delicate proposition. If seeming is all we have, then we must rely on perspective-sharing, discussion, and deliberation to feel out our situation or situatedness, and not on one “decider” who locates judgment and diligence in his chest or digestive tract.

Colbert’s critique of contemporary habits of negotiating being and seeming offered stability to the interpersonal dynamics and public politics of authenticity. (One challenge he has faced in his new gig is that of “introducing his real self to the public.”) It is likely that even the most devoted viewers of The Colbert Report did not notice the Latin phrase on the studio mantel. Those who did likely did not ponder the rich significance of its reversal of esse quam videri. VIDERI QUAM ESSE was nonetheless an engagement with antiquity that challenged our contemporary tendencies. Or so it would seem.

Michele Kennerly is an Assistant Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at The Pennsylvania State University. She is co-editor (with Damien Pfister) of the forthcoming volume, Ancient Rhetorics + Digital Networks (2017), and is completing a monograph tentatively titled, Editorial Bodies: Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics.