Plato Philomythos

6: Plato Philomythos Diskin Clay S The devotee of myth is in a way a philosopher, for myth is made up of things that cause wonder. Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.982b18–19 The Myth of Logos vs. Mythos he luxuriant varieties of definitions of Greek “myth” are a symptom of the remoteness of our culture from the culture of ancient Greece. We have no real equivalent for the traditional Tstories and histories that circulated among the Greeks (and Romans) concerning their origins, the origins of their world, their gods and the progeny of their gods, the relation between humans and animals, and the fate awaiting mortals after death. The term myth now carries a pejorative sense in modern languages, as is evident from the use of the word in titles such as Wilhelm Nestle’s Vom Mythos zum Logos: Die Selbstentfaltung des griechischen Denkens (1941) or Ernst Cassirer’s The Myth of the State (1946), to name only two philosophical titles from the middle of the last century.1 In Homer, mythos is a word that describes something said in the epic. But already in Herodotus the word mythos had come to describe an idle and unbelievable tale. The tradition concerning Oceanus and the Greek traditions concerning Heracles are cases in point; both are mythoi (Histories 2.23.1 and 2.45.1). Yet Herodotus’ predecessor, Hecataeus of Miletus, can describe his own history as a mythos (FGrH 1 F 1 Jacoby) and, conversely, traditional but misleading historical accounts as logoi. In the age of Socrates, the philosopher Empedocles, who wrote in epic verse, could use the Homeric term mythos for his own philosophical arguments and religious teachings.2 Thucydides rejected what he called the poets’ “tendency to myth” (to mythodes, The Peloponnesian War 1.21), 210 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Fordham University, on 06 Jul 2018 at 17:54:29, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521845205.007Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2009 Plato Philomythos but, in his narrative of speeches made in assemblies and the facts on the ground, logoi were often the equivalent of myths. He constructs his history of the Peloponnesian War on the fatal contrast between what men say and the underlying reality of their situation.3 Much later Strabo will distinguish between two radically different forms of writing: that presented “in guise of myth” and that presented “in guise of history.”4 Plato, whose hostility toward poetry was notorious in antiquity, as it is now, would seem to be an enemy of myth, but his Socrates, who comes forward as the fiercest enemy of poetry in the Platonic dialogues, was captivated by Aesop and his myths. At the end of his life, in response to a recurring dream vision admonishing him to “become musical,” Socrates took to setting Aesopian fables (usually called ainoi) into verse. Socrates calls them mythoi (Phaedo 60-C-D). How instructive it would be for humans, the possessors of logos, to speak with animals is evident in Plato’s Statesman 272B, a scene beautifully illustrated by the red-figure kylix in the Vatican showing a fox instructing Aesop (Figure 1). Plato bears a likeness to his Socrates. He would seem to qual- ify as the philosophical devotee of myth (the philomythos as philosophos) Aristotle describes in Metaphysics A. Or, perhaps, the order should be reversed to describe him as the philosopher devoted, not so much to traditional myths of his Greek culture, but to the creation of new myths to counter the charm of the old. Because of the deliberate ambigu- ity he has created in his dialogues as to what constitutes a mythos and what qualifies as a logos, Plato has contributed to our modern confusion over what can be described as a “myth.” But, as he sometimes etches a sharp contrast between mythos and logos, he has also contributed to the common conception of Greek thought as evolving from the traditional, anonymous, and personified aetiologies of early Greek thinking to rational, logical, and “scientific” thought. In the Gorgias, for example, Plato has his Socrates give an account of the last judgment that awaits all humans in death, a possibility Socrates entertains briefly at the end of Plato’s Apology (40C–1C). His interlocutor, the tough realist Callicles, will, Socrates thinks, regard his account as a fable (mythos); but what he will describe is in fact a noble and true account (logos) of reality (Gor- gias 523A). The distinction does not hold. Elsewhere in Plato, what we would regard as his seriously meant truth is often treated as a mythos, and fictions, based on traditional accounts, are called logoi. Toapproach the topic of Plato and myth, a fast definition of Greek “myth” is neither necessary nor possible. Our topic involves both the criticism of traditional Greek myths in the Platonic dialogues and the nontraditional “myths” that Plato created to replace what had become 211 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Fordham University, on 06 Jul 2018 at 17:54:29, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521845205.007Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2009 The Cambridge Companion to Greek Mythology traditional. In many cases, his own language allows us to determine what he regarded as a mythos, but a shift in perspective can make a mythos of a logos and a logos of a mythos. As we approach what have long counted in the census of Platonic “myths,”5 it should be noted that they are often based on a traditional story and that they correct this story by substituting a philosophical version of it. Thus, they tend to describe a supernatural reality or a reality that transcends our human experience but that our experience can give us some inkling of: that is, what lies hidden in the present, the remote past, and what awaits the human soul in the future. These Platonic myths are usually attributed to an anonymous oral source; they cannot be confirmed or falsified, except by someone who has had the experience of these realities, such as the fictional Er of the myth of Er in the Republic or the “heralds” responsible for our faint memory of the Golden Age, who lived on the “cusp” of the great periodic reversals of time in the myth of the Statesman (271A). It has been said that myth died in Plato’s youth.6 It did not. Of all Greek philosophers, Plato is the most mythopoeic. For some of his myths he (meaning his Socrates) creates a philosophical counterpart to traditional poetic accounts of origins, as he does in the Republic (3.414B– 415D), where he offers a myth of the metals to counter and supplant Hes- iod’s “myth of the metals” in Works and Days (109–201). In the “Great Myth” of the Statesman, Plato’s visitor from Velia will connect and rec- oncile scattered and unrelated Greek oral traditions (268D–274E). His Socrates offers a striking version of the Underworld at the conclusion of the Republic (10.514A–517A). Plato designs it to supplant the Homeric book of the dead (Nekuia)inOdyssey 11. Myth, meaning the false or misleading traditions transmitted orally and anonymously in Greek culture, is often dismissed in the Platonic dialogues, but never simply as myth (mythos). Whether a narrative is called mythos or logos depends on the viewpoint of the teller of the tale (usually Socrates) and his audience. As Plato criticizes Greek myth and as he invents his own countermyths, his reader is confronted with constantly shifting perspectives. The old wives’ tales (mormolykeia) of punishment in the afterlife are dismissed by Socrates as figments that instill fear in young children, who have no capacity for judging them. But in his own “myths of judgment” he has his own terrifying prediction of the fate that awaits the evil in death.7 A passage in the Platonic dialogues that reveals Plato’s philosophical ambivalence toward myth comes at the opening of the Phaedrus, the dialogue that provides us with the best clue to the meaning of myth in Plato. Socrates and his companion, Phaedrus, have left the city of Athens for the Attic countryside in mid-August. As they ascend the stream of 212 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Fordham University, on 06 Jul 2018 at 17:54:29, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521845205.007Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2009 Plato Philomythos the Ilissus, Phaedrus asks Socrates if the place they had reached was not the site where Boreas, the god of the North Wind, had carried off the young Athenian princess, Oreithyia (Phaedrus 229B–230A). Socrates, who pretends that he is a tourist to the Attic countryside, has already noticed an altar to Boreas downstream. Phaedrus asks him if he believes in such traditional tales (Phaedrus 229A). Socrates remains noncommital. It is better, he says, to accept these tales than to take on the task of the intellectuals (sophoi) who give a laborious and rational explanation of such stories. That is: Boreas was not a god but the North Wind, and a gust of wind pushed Oreithyia off a cliff, either above the Ilissus or from the outcropping of the Areopagus. By this interpretation, the sophists remove the gods as active in human life; only the human actors remain. In the myths he tells in the Platonic dialogues Socrates never fails to invoke the gods.

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