The Goddesses Truth and Trust
The Ancient Myths Behind Research Integrity
We tend to think of research integrity as a modern invention: a child of bureaucracy, born somewhere between the IRB form, data management plan, and the ORCiD profile. Research integrity lives in policies, checklists, and training modules. Necessary but hardly inspiring.
Yet, the current anxiety around science exemplified by the reproducibility crisis, paper mills, AI-generated data, manipulated images etc. suggests something deeper than procedural failure. What feels threatened is not just accuracy, but belief.
Reading Helen Morales’ “Classical Mythology”1 reminded me that myths do their most interesting work when they surface precisely at moments of cultural friction. They are not quaint stories but ideological technologies of ways societies negotiate truth, power, and trust. From that perspective, research integrity begins to look less like a rulebook and more like a ritual struggle between two ancient, and uneasy, goddesses.
Two Goddesses Walk into a Lab
No, this is not the start of a joke but an allegorical view to illustrate my story:
In Greek thought, Aletheia is truth not as correctness but as unconcealment. The word literally means “not forgetting,” “not hidden.” Truth is what is dragged into the light, what refuses to remain buried. The Romans preferred Veritas, a more moralised figure: truth as rightness, propriety, and social virtue. Veritas, famously, lives at the bottom of a well. This allegorical location was used to represent the difficulty of finding the truth, emphasizing that truth is elusive and requires significant effort to uncover.
Alongside them stands Fides, the Roman goddess of trust. Fides was not a feeling. She was “infrastructure” (a previous FoSci post (link) focuses on the need for infrastructure for research integrity purposes). Treaties were sworn in her temples: sacred spaces where the historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus chronicled the foundations of law 2, the poet-historian Livy wove ritual into the Roman soul 3, and the statesman Cicero invoked her as the Republic’s ultimate anchor, declaring her the “most sacred and inviolable thing in the world”4.
Soldiers pledged loyalty in her name; contracts were held together by her presence. To violate fides was not merely to lie, but to destabilize the social order itself. Yet Greek myth offers a darker mirror in Pistis, the personification of trust as belief and persuasion. When Pandora’s jar was opened, Pistis fled to the heavens 5, abandoning humanity to an age of suspicion. We are the inheritors of that abandonment. In a world where research integrity is no longer a goddess to be honored, we attempt to fill the celestial void with the sterile tools of the trade. In her absence, we build new “temples” out of digital trails and audit logs, hoping that a Data Management Plan might stand in for the divine certainty we lost.
Seen this way, research integrity is not governed by a single principle, but by the constant negotiation between Truth and Trust: Between what is revealed and who is believed.
Aletheia (truth & unconcealment) in the Age of Open Science
In the modern laboratory and the research endeavour in general, Aletheia has found new devotees. Examples of open data, preregistration, registered reports, or replication studies are not administrative burdens so much as rituals of unconcealment. They are attempts to prevent forgetting. To ensure that null results, failed hypotheses, and inconvenient data are not quietly lowered back into the well.
The Open Science Framework, data repositories, and transparent workflows all echo Aletheia’s ancient demand: nothing essential should remain hidden. Truth, here, is not perfection. It is exposure.
But Aletheia is a demanding goddess. She doesn’t care about intention. An honest mistake still wounds her. A statistical error, a mislabeled image, a missing dataset … these pollute the record, even when no deceit is involved.
This is where discomfort begins.
Fides (trust) and the Fragile Architecture of Belief
Let’s meet Fides, because research cannot function on Aletheia alone.
No scientist reruns every experiment they cite. No reviewer replicates an entire study before recommending publication. The system works because it rests on Fides, basically on good faith.
Peer review is not a truth machine; it is a trust ritual. Authorship declarations, conflict-of-interest statements, ethical approvals, all these are vows sworn at the modern altar of Fides.
Institutions like Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), and the US Gov Office of Research Integrity (ORI), and editorial boards function less like police forces than like priesthoods, tasked with maintaining belief in the system. Their power lies not in omniscience, but in authority: the ability to say this breach matters.
When trust collapses, facts alone cannot save us.
Where the Goddesses Clash
Helen Morales would insist we look for friction, and here in our case looking at research and communication of its outcomes this is unavoidable: An honest error offends Aletheia but may leave Fides intact. The record must be corrected, but the researcher remains trustworthy.
Fraud, by contrast, is a double sacrilege. Fabrication and manipulation poison Veritas, corrupting the shared body of knowledge. At the same time, they shatter Fides, breaking the social contract that allows science to function at scale. This is why misconduct cases feel so existential. They are not just about bad data. They are about betrayal.
And this is why purely technical solutions like better software, better checks, better AI detectors will never be sufficient. They speak only to truth, not to trust.
Research Integrity as a Living Myth
If research integrity feels brittle today, it may be because we’ve forgotten its mythic foundations. Truth is not self-executing. Trust is not automatic. They require constant maintenance, storytelling, and shared belief. The ancients understood this. They built temples, rituals, and personifications because they knew these forces were too important to leave abstract.
Perhaps the task now is not to invent new rules, but to recover better stories. To speak of research integrity not as compliance, but as a fragile alliance between Aletheia and Fides. Between what we reveal and why we believe each other.
Without truth, science is empty.
Without trust, it is impossible.
And somewhere, still at the bottom of the well, Veritas is waiting to see whether we remember that.
Bibliography
1 Morales, Helen, Classical Mythology: A Very Short Introduction, Very Short Introductions (2013) ISBN: 9780192804761, Oxford University Press
2 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities (Antiquitates Romanae) 2.75.2–3 Dionysius provides the most direct reference to the temple’s role in international relations. He records that the second king of Rome, Numa Pompilius, established the temple of Fides Publica (Public Faith) to make the oath taken in her name the most binding of all. He explicitly states:
“...he [Numa] also founded a temple to Faith (Pistis in Greek, Fides in Latin)... and ordered that the treaties (homologias) made in her name should be preserved there”
3 Livy, History of Rome (Ab Urbe Condita) 1.21.3–4 Livy describes the institution of Fides as a goddess by Numa. He notes that Numa established a solemn festival for Fides and ordered that the flamines (priests) should be carried to her temple in a covered chariot, with their right hands wrapped to the fingers, signifying that faith must be protected and that the right hand is its sacred seat (Livy, 1.21.4). Since the right hand (dextra) was the gesture used to seal treaties (foedera), the temple became the symbolic home of these agreements.
4 Cicero, De Officiis 3.104 Cicero discusses Fides as the “most sacred and most inviolable thing in the world” (Fides est enim vis ac potestas...). He mentions that the ancestors of the Romans placed the Temple of Fides on the Capitoline Hill, right next to the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, specifically because Fides was the guarantor of all oaths and treaties.
5 Theognis, Elegies 1135–1150 (Found in Greek Elegiac Poetry: From the Seventh to the Fifth Centuries BC, edited and translated by Douglas E. Gerber, Loeb Classical Library 258, Harvard University Press).
“Hope (Elpis) is the only good god remaining among mankind; the others have left and gone to Olympus. Trust (Pistis), a mighty god, has gone; Restraint (Sophrosyne) has gone from men; and the Graces, my friend, have abandoned the earth. Men’s judicial oaths are no longer to be trusted, nor does anyone revere the immortal gods.”
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