In Pantelis Prevelakis' Chronicle of a City (1938), the literary approach to historical time ("[Rethymnon] to live today and tomorrow and forever") strives for an artistic "style of life" with permanence. The literary text not only anticipates its future fate, but also condenses the different levels of time into the common time of the narrative in order to consolidate them into an aesthetic structure. This article analyses the particular poetological basis of 'honesty' on which Prevelakis based Chronicle of a City, not so much in terms of the thematic and ideological dispositions of the literary text, but mainly through its intertextual connections, with particular reference to Paul Valéry's dialogues Eupalinos ou l'Architecte (1921) and L'Âme et la Dance (1921).