The academically regulated engagement with fictions is known today as literary studies. To understand its particular cultural role, Heinz Schlaffer's investigations trace back to the beginnings of knowledge about poetry, even further back to a time when such knowledge did not exist at all. It is only in Greek civilization that poetry comes under suspicion of being fiction, if not a lie. Since then, poetry, which was once the privileged medium of knowledge, can itself become the subject of scholarly inquiry. Now, readers are allowed to engage with fictions without having to decide whether to believe or reject them. Such an aesthetic state promises meaning and, fortunately, does not fulfill that promise.