Myth, History, and Dialectic in Plato’s Republic and Timaeus-Critias

Among the dichotomies which the dichotomic theme of this volume inevitably generates is the opposition–all too easily posited–between the rational and the irrational. For the present paper I have taken a theme, the mythology of technology, which seems to bridge that opposition. Whatever Plato might have thought and said about it, technélars was, for most of antiquity, a procedure about which rational discourse was the rule. It is not surprising that in the late nineteenth century the development of technology in Greece was inscribed into the paradigm ‘From Mythos to Logos’: together with science, technology was seen as being emancipated from religion to constitute a new and independent field. In more recent times the process has been described by Jean-Pierre Vernant as a ‘laïcisation des techniques’: Vernant did not himself completely reject the older, ‘From Mythos to Logos’ view, but rather modified it, differentiating between the theoreticians with whom full rationality set in during, at the latest, the age of Aristotle, and the practitioners who worked by trial and error and were thus always exposed to a trace of irrationality and unpredictability.1 In this article I shall not argue about Vernant’s assessment (his concept of rationality is Platonic and might therefore not do full justice to all the facts). What I intend to do is more limited in scope: I shall concern myself with the intersection of myth and technology, more precisely that of myth and metallurgy.

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