Plato’s Exoteric Myths

Abstract

Already at the very beginning of Greek literature, Homer takes pains to transform the transmitted muthos, the traditional body of legends concerning men and gods. In every generation of Greek culture, poets, philosophers, and ordinary listeners struggled to find some kind of mediation between the given, generally accepted, and yet sometimes simply intolerable muthos on the one hand and the inquisitive, ambitious, and never fully satisfied logos on the other. Various passages in Plato's works provide contradictory indications about just how to understand the opposition between muthos and logos . In Plato's project of educating a new philosophical audience, his dialectic and his myths are closely bound together. It is not at all the case that only dialectic represents the true philosophy in Plato's writings. Keywords:Greek literature; logos ; Plato's Exoteric myths