The Role of Myth in Plato and Its Prolongations in Antiquity

Plato was the first author to use the term mÛthos (myth) in our modern sense.1 1. On this point, see Platon, les mots et les mythes (1982), 2d ed. (Paris: La Découverte, 1995). English translation in Luc Brisson and Gerard Naddaf, Plato: The Myth Maker (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1999). He described the role of myth in Athens, in order to contrast it with an argumentative philosophical discourse aimed at the truth. Even so, he had recourse to this unverifiable story not only in a practical role, in order to persuade the citizen to obey moral norms and political laws, but also in a theoretical context, evoking premises from which philosophical discourse could develop, and picturing realities such as the soul, that could not be grasped by either the senses or the intellect. With the disappearance of the city-state and the constitution of Kingdoms and Empires, the social and political aspects of myth tended to disappear in the Mediterranean world, allowing the soul to take “centre-stage.” While theogony, cosmogony, and anthropogony persisted, they did so only to provide a framework for a vast drama—that of the salvation of the human soul—as described in the Chaldaean Oracles and the treatises of the Sethian Gnostics

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