Fiction was disguise: from those seeking out the same waterhole, the same sparse quarry, or meagre sexual chance. to misinform, to utter less than the truth, was to gain a vital edge of space or subsistence. natural selection would favor the contriver… loki, odysseus are very late literary concentrations of the widely dif- fused motif of the liar, of the dissembler elusive as flame and water, who survives (steiner 1975 , p. 224). concealment and deceit are different phenomena, although they share something in common. their mutual relationship is not so straightforward. guy durandin, in his study les fondements du mensonge ( 1972 , p. 20), pointed out a par- allel between concealment and deceit. these strategies are used both for offensive (prevarication) and defensive pur – poses (survival). to hide oneself does not entail using lan guage, nor does it imply the reference to a semantic notion of truth. as harshorne and may pointed out ( 1928 , p. 19), “the practice of deception is far older than language”. it is worth noting that, for durandin, concealment is regarded as the model for all types of lies: we shall first point out that a number of are able to hide , either to escape their enemies or to watch for their own prey and attack them by surprise. […] it may be objected that it is not a lie, because this