The Problem With Literary Creativity in Ancient Sources

I'm slightly obsessed with the idea of creativity because I know that authors lie a lot or sometimes when we see something let's not call it lying it's like Instagram you put forward your best self exactly or the most engaging version of something. When we look at these ancient sources how far maybe can we use them to understand the communities that produce them do they give an accurate perspective or account of daily life what can we really do with these? The only thing I think I can retrieve from these texts as a historian from a historical standpoint is information about the author and I know that that's tricky because we have trouble with manuscript traditions and all of that but the only things that I can really fill in