You are standing in a field. There is a person in front of you and a tree to one side. To make a true statement about the tree to that person, you must use language to form a proposition that makes your experience of the tree intelligible to the person you are addressing. If you say “the tree is an oak” and Marcus perceives a birch, the statement will not be received as true, but if Marcus's perceptions can be brought under the same linguistic categories as your own, then your statement will be received as true, and, inasmuch it will now be able to be reproduced by other speakers having similar experiences and again received as true, then it will become “the truth.” Such is the classic western referential understanding of truth, from Augustine's discussion of how children learn the names of things (Confessions 1.8) to Hegel's deconstruction of the empiricist postulate of sense-certainty (see below). A similar paradigm underlies many of our current notions of scientific method, particularly as deployed in the social sciences. This scenario, however, begs certain questions. How do we align Marcus's categories with our own? How do we agree on the nature of an oak, let alone beauty, justice, or national identity? What kind of force, suasion, or manipulation needs to be deployed for such truth to come into being, for experience to be understandable, and for place, a location on a grid of intelligibility, to take place? These are central questions for philosophy and rhetorical theory from antiquity to the present. This paper argues that only a concerted reading of the ancient texts in conversation with their modern and postmodern interlocutors can begin to help us form cogent answers to those questions—can permit us the historical depth and theoretical sophistication necessary to begin to understand our own conjuncture in the “history of truth.”