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The International Journal of the Platonic Tradition 7 (2013) 221-228 brill.com/jpt

Critical Notice
Literary Form and Philosophical Discourse:
The Problem of Myth in the Platonic Dialogues

A discussion of: Catherine Collobert, Pierre Destrée, Francisco J. Gonzalez (eds.),

The present volume is the result of a conference held at the University of Ottawa
in May 2008. The book falls into two parts, preceded by the editors’ introduction
and followed by a list of references and a very useful index locorum. The first part
is devoted to general questions concerning the nature, function, main character-
istics of myths in Platonic dialogues, their relationships with allegories and
images, their status from the perspective of Platonic writing, and their reception
in Neoplatonic interpretations. It consists of six chapters written by Glenn Most,
Monique Dixsaut, Harold Tarrant, G. R. F. Ferrari, Catherine Collobert, and Pierre
Destrée.
The second part is devoted to the analysis of specific myths. In chapters seven
and eight respectively, Claude Calame and Gerd Van Riel analyze the myth of
Prometheus in the Protagoras. The following five chapters are devoted to myths
of judgment in the afterlife: Radcliffe Edmonds and Christopher Rowe deal with
the final myth in the Gorgias; Elizabeth Pender explores the correspondence
between the different parts of the underworld geography in the final myth of the
Phaedo and the cognitive and moral conditions of the souls dwelling in each part
of that landscape; chapters twelve (by Annie Larivée) and thirteen (by Francisco
Gonzalez) analyze the myth of Er in the Republic. In the following two chapters
Christopher Moore and Franco Trabattoni approach from different perspectives
the myth of Theuth in the Phaedrus. In chapter sixteen, Kathryn Morgan focuses
on theriomorphism in the mythical presentations of the soul. According to
Morgan, the image of Typhon in Phdr. 230a3-6, that of the chariot team in the
Palinode, and the mixture of animal and human nature in the strange creature
described at Resp. IX 588c2-10, show Plato’s awareness of how language fails to
capture the soul’s nature and its embodiment. Chapter seventeen (by Elsa Grasso)
and eighteen (by Luc Brisson) are devoted to the eikos muthos of the Timaeus,
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/18725473-12341263
222 Critical Notice / The International Journal of the Platonic Tradition 7 (2013) 221-228

while in chapter nineteen Christoph Horn aims to show that the myth of the
Statesman is a ‘doctrinal myth’, which presents in narrative fashion important
elements of Plato’s theology. The final chapter, written by Louis-André Dorion,
brings us back to the beginning. In chapter one Glenn Most proposes eight crite-
ria for determining which parts of Plato’s texts are myths; Dorion, by applying
those criteria to the story of the oracle of Delphi in the Apology, argues that it is
not only a fictitious account, but also a myth.
Let me say from the outset that this imposing volume constitutes an excellent
addition to the numerous treatments of the role of myth in Plato’s dialogues.
Most papers are strong pieces of scholarship, deal with fundamental questions,
and offer interesting textual analysis. Yet, as is often the case with conference
proceedings, more cross-referencing and discussion within chapters would have
been welcome, since the different authors hold positions that are often at odds
with each other, but rarely comment on their disagreements.
Let me single out Glenn Most’s contribution as an example. The author sug-
gests that the eight criteria he proposes are not meant to be uncontroversial and
that they admit of exceptions (p. 16). The approach is interesting insofar as Most
does not limit himself either to considerations of form (as in criterion 1: ‘Platonic
myths are almost always monological’), or of content (as in criterion 4: ‘Platonic
myths always deal with objects and events that cannot be verified’). Instead, he
also includes the ‘concrete conditions of the communicative situations of the
speakers and their listeners’ (p. 15). So, for example, criterion 2 reads: ‘Platonic
myths are probably always recounted by an older speaker to younger listeners’.
The author maintains that ‘the only possible exception is Aristophanes’ myth in
the Symposium’ (p. 16), but does not consider this a significant counter-example
because, at the dramatic date of the dialogue, Aristophanes would have been
already 44 years old, and ‘a brilliant comic poet might well have sought a par-
ticular comic effect by permitting himself to pretend to be older than he really
was’ (pp. 16-17).
However, criterion 2 seems to be contradicted by Destrée when he acutely
observes that Glaucon, at Resp. 359b-c, introduces his tale by announcing that he
is composing a myth, ‘or more precisely re-composing a muthos by allegedly
reporting what some (unnamed) mythologoi have said (359d)’ (p. 113). The story
told by the young Glaucon to the older Socrates in book II of the Republic, of
which Destrée offers an insightful analysis, is considered a myth also by Dixsaut
(p. 39), Collobert (p. 100), and Larivée (p. 252). One is left wondering whether
Most’s thesis that myths are told by older people to younger people in the Platonic
dialogues was challenged by the scholars attending the conference in Ottawa. It
would certainly have been interesting to find the issue discussed in the book.
A similar problem can be detected with respect to criterion 5: ‘Platonic myths
generally derive their authority not from the speakers’ personal experience but
 Critical Notice / The International Journal of the Platonic Tradition 7 (2013) 221-228 223

from the tradition’. Most here fails to consider the difference between Greek
myths belonging to the oral tradition and the creative transformations that those
myths undergo when they become material for Plato’s writing. Criterion 5 would
not be problematic with respect to Plato only if we took it to mean something
fairly trivial, i.e., that most of the time characters who tell myths in the dialogues
claim to have heard them from someone else (in the near or distant past). Appeal
to tradition, however, is not necessarily what gives a Platonic myth its authority,
especially when Plato has his characters tell stories that elaborate on previously
known mythical examples. This point is clearly stated by Horn: ‘what is charac-
teristic of the Statesman myth is its free use of the narrative material, not the
recourse to what is authoritative, self-evident, or generally shared’ (p. 400; cf.
note 10 in the same page). Trabattoni makes an analogous point concerning
Phdr., 275b5-c2. In that passage, Socrates is answering Phaedrus’ charge that he
makes up stories from Egypt or from wherever he likes (275b3-4). As Trabattoni
observes, according to Socrates ‘the reason the priests of Dodona pay attention to
the words of the oak is not simply that they are certain it is the spokesman of
Zeus. But they listen to its words “provided only that they said what was true”
[. . .]. What follows from this is that the only condition capable of lending author-
ity to a logos is the truthfulness of the content it expresses’ (p. 307). From this
observation one might conclude that Socrates himself would wish Phaedrus not
to yield to the authority of the myths he has been listening to in the course of the
dialogue. Rather, Phaedrus (and by extension we, the readers) should lend
those myths authority only if, after close examination, they turn out to exhibit
some truth (and the difficulty, of course, is: what does it mean for a myth to
exhibit some truth?).
A further potentially controversial point in the list of criteria compiled by Most
(and not discussed in the course of the book) is number 7: ‘Platonic myths are
never structured as dialectic but instead always as description or narration’. With
respect to this point, Most explains that ‘the Platonic myths are structured either
synchronically as the description of the coexisting parts of a place (so in the
Phaedo, Gorgias, and Republic) or, more often, diachronically as the narration of
successive episodes of one or more larger actions (so in the Protagoras, in the
myth of writing in the Phaedrus, in the Symposium, in the myth of Atlantis in the
Timaeus and in the Laws)’ (p. 18). My concern here is with the ‘either/or’ formula-
tion. The final myth of the Gorgias, for example, does not simply describe judg-
ment after death, but also narrates the transformation to which final judgments
were subjected when the Age of Chronos was followed by the Age of Zeus. This
is not a minor point. As I had occasion to argue,1 Socrates intends to suggest, by

1) A. Fussi, “The Myth of the Last Judgment in the Gorgias,” The Review of Metaphysics,
Vol. 54, No. 3, Mar., 2001, pp. 529-552.
224 Critical Notice / The International Journal of the Platonic Tradition 7 (2013) 221-228

this most interesting diachronic mythical narration, that his interlocutors speak
to each other and judge each other as if they were still the members of the age of
Chronos: they rely on external appearance and on the quantity and prestige of
the witnesses who happen to agree with them; they are not open to what might
be unexpected, but, rather, treat conversation as a rhetorical exercise in which
one knows in advance how to answer all questions. Conversely, the age of Zeus
presents some fundamental traits of Socrates’s own dialogic revolution: the open-
ness to the unexpected implied by the search for truth about the soul, a more
authentic mode to relate to others, and the ultimate fallibility of judgment echo
Socrates’ philosophical alternative to the rhetorical attitude exemplified by
Gorgias and Polus in the dialogue. Some of these points are also noticed by
Edmonds and Rowe, who, in the present volume, consider the narration of the
final myth of the Gorgias as significantly linked to the interaction of the charac-
ters within the dialogue as a whole. Unfortunately, neither Edmonds nor Rowe
question Most’s thesis that myths either describe parts of a place or narrate sub-
sequent events.
It is somewhat misleading to call the characteristics identified by Most a list of
‘criteria’ for identifying myths in the Platonic dialogues. This empirical collection
of data does not apply well to certain myths, and, by admission of the author
himself, does not aspire to be complete.
One significant exception to the paucity of cross-referencing within the book
is found in Dorion’s essay, which, in order to prove that the famous story of the
Delphic oracle is a myth, refers readers back to Most’s contribution and employs
his list of criteria in a normative fashion. Yet, because of the fundamental differ-
ence between a definition of a myth and a mere list of properties that happen to
be shared by some myths some of the time, there is no special reason to believe
that the properties listed by Most ought to be shared by all myths, or that they
could allow us to demonstrate that certain stories are in fact myths.2
Dorion’s application of Most’s criteria is problematic, and, in certain instances,
it appears to be based on equivocation. Let us consider criterion 1 (‘Platonic
myths are almost always monological’). In the Apology we find Socrates address-
ing a crowd of jurors, not holding a casual conversation with a small number of
individuals, as is usually the case. The relevant literary genre here would be foren-
sic rhetoric, not the Socratic dialogue. That Socrates’ listeners in the Apology do
not interrupt him when he recounts the story of the Delphic oracle can hardly be
proof that what he tells is a myth, even if when he tells myths in other dialogues
his interlocutors do not interrupt him (this does not imply that we should not

2) Here I agree with Christian Schäfer, who reviewed this volume for Bryn Mawr Classical
Review (http://www.bmcreview.org/2012/11/20121103.html).
 Critical Notice / The International Journal of the Platonic Tradition 7 (2013) 221-228 225

consider carefully when and how Socrates is being interrupted by his noisy audi-
ence in the Apology). As to the second criterion (myths are told by older people
to younger people) Dorion finds that it is satisfied by Socrates’ story in the Apol-
ogy because at the time of the trial Socrates is seventy years old and most listen-
ers are certainly younger. The problem is one of adherence to Plato’s stylistic
indications. If in a dialogue we find an old person speaking to one or more inter-
locutors whose relative youth is stressed (as in the Phaedo), we are entitled to
consider youth a relevant factor. If the same old person is portrayed when
addressing a mostly undifferentiated crowd of jurors, our inferences concerning
the age of the group of listeners cannot bear the same weight as if they had been
invited by the text. If the seventy-year-old Socrates had been speaking to a group
of athletes in a gymnasium the point would have been stronger.3 Dorion helps us
identify several fictitious aspects of Socrates’ story, and he very interestingly
shows how unreliable and unverifiable it appears to be upon close examination.
However, he does not prove conclusively that the story is indeed a myth.
One could read this collection as an interesting survey of the typical alterna-
tives that follow from different interpretations of Plato’s philosophy in general
and of the relationship between literary form and philosophical content in par-
ticular. In the following observations I would like to highlight a few differences in
the interpretative strategies adopted by the contributors to this volume.
Trabattoni holds that dialectical argument and myth complement each other
because the former leads us from the world of becoming to the metaphysical
otherness of ideas, but ‘it falls upon the latter, and no longer dialectics, to describe
this supra-celestial place, whose existence had been established by dialectics
itself’ (p. 315). The function of myth is thus to give a positive characterization of
metaphysical objects (ideas, the immortal and immaterial soul) or situations (the
condition of humanity before history, the judgment after death) which are beyond
the temporal and physical conditions of ordinary life. On the other hand, Brisson
argues that the myth in the Timaeus is called an eikos muthos, not because it deals
with metaphysical entities (ideas), but precisely because it deals with the sensible
world, i.e. with images: ‘Since Timaeus is talking about the sensible world, which
is a mere image of genuine reality, intelligible reality, his myth and his explana-
tion cannot achieve a stable truth, whose object is reality, and they must be con-
tent with the likeness (eikos), whose truth can be shaken by persuasion’
(pp. 390-391). So, while Trabattoni and Brisson agree that logos and muthos com-
plement each other, they differ on the role logos is supposed to play. For ­Trabattoni

3) When at Gorg., 521e, Socrates says of his trial: ‘I shall be like a doctor tried by a bench
of children on a charge brought up by a cook,’ he is not complaining about the actual age
of the jurors, but about their lack of judgment and their silly expectations of life.
226 Critical Notice / The International Journal of the Platonic Tradition 7 (2013) 221-228

logos gives way to muthos when the object is metaphysical reality, or when the
situation described is beyond experience (as is the case with the origin of the
world); Brisson agrees that the story of the Timaeus ‘is a myth situated upstream
of error and of truth, because nobody was there at the time’ (p. 375). Yet he main-
tains that logos can satisfactorily address intelligible reality (‘intelligible forms are
known by the intellect and are the objects of science’, p. 373), while the myth in
the Timaeus is merely likely (eikos) because it addresses the sensible world, which
is only an image of true reality.
It is debatable whether in the Platonic dialogues myths are pieces of writing
directed at unprofessional audiences (as for Most, who embraces the distinction
between exoteric writings and esoteric teaching), or whether they can best be
understood as rhetorical invitations to particular interlocutors in specific dialogic
situations (as for Calame and Moore). For Dixsaut, in turn, myths are utterances
that involve rhetoric in the sense that they enjoin us readers (not just the char-
acters to whom they are addressed) to see things from a different perspective,
and hence to modify our behavior. They do not teach a doctrine because
their message is ‘affective, not argumentative’ (45), but they question our view of
things and lead us to ‘perceive the crushing absurdity in the way men live their
lives’ (p. 44).
Plato’s anonymity (the fact that he never personally endorses any particular
doctrine in the dialogues) does not play a significant role for some scholars, while
speaking of ‘Plato’s doctrine’ on any particular issue seems to be very problematic
for others. This difference expresses itself in stylistic choices as well: some authors
(Most, Destrée, Van Riel) do not hesitate to treat an utterance or a thesis defended
by a certain character as if it was made by Plato (cfr. pp. 15, 23, 110, 111, 154, 155),
while others prefer always to indicate who says what in any given dialogic situa-
tion. Personally, I find the latter option not only faithful to the literary character
of the dialogues, but also more profitable for interpretation. Attuning to different
voices refines our perception of what we can consider salient. This is evident in
Gonzales’ masterful analysis of the myth of Er, which draws attention to the ten-
sion between two voices (that of the priest and that of Socrates) concerning the
relationship between luck and philosophical wisdom in the choice of a life that
might lead to happiness.
Distinguishing between Plato’s doctrine and that of a given character can be
tricky. For example, Van Riel attempts to show that Protagoras’ myth in the Pro-
tagoras ‘expresses a number of anthropological points which represent Plato’s
own doctrines’ (p. 145). Van Riel offers both a detailed analysis of Protagoras’
myth and a comparison between its content and that of other myths (in the Laws
and the Statesman). One important observation is that in the myth told by
Protagoras religion belongs to the first stage of human development, while dikē
 Critical Notice / The International Journal of the Platonic Tradition 7 (2013) 221-228 227

and aidōs belong to a second stage. This is Van Riel’s conclusion: ‘religion—an
effect of the possession of fire—is more deeply rooted in human nature than
sociality. It is more fundamental, and more “natural” than what is handed over in
the second gift. So a religious attitude precedes all kinds of social behavior and of
community. That is why Plato refuses to let his lawgivers interfere in religious
matters’ (pp. 161-162). I wonder whether, thanks to Van Riel’s fine distinction
between the stages in Protagoras’ myth, we should not conclude that the myth
contains an implicit critique of primitive religion rather than an endorsement of
it. If appreciating justice and feeling shame are alien to original religion, one has
no difficulty imagining a religion populated by shameless and unjust gods (gods
similar to those portrayed by Homer and Hesiod and criticized by Socrates in the
Republic). Whether this anthropological point is common to Protagoras and Plato
remains, in any case, an open question.
Even when scholars agree that Plato’s myths complement the philosophical
arguments developed in the dialogues, they do not necessarily interpret comple-
mentarity in the same way. One interesting question is whether myths express
(or integrate) Plato’s theological and political system or, rather, indicate his
awareness of the shortcomings of a philosophical system. Myths can be seen to
complement arguments in the sense of illustrating, developing with different
means, or making emotionally persuasive a certain theory, or they can be seen to
complement arguments in a negative, dialectical fashion. In the latter case, myths
do not point to a solution, but rather draw attention to a problem that the theory
in question does not address.
In the present volume readers will find instances of both interpretative atti-
tudes. On the one hand, Pender’s analysis of the final myth of the Phaedo aims to
show that the complex geography of Tartarus, with its ethical and epistemologi-
cal implications, supports the teleology for which Socrates argued in the course
of the dialogue. The complementarity of logos and muthos is interpreted similarly
by Rowe and Edmonds in their respective analyses of the final myth of judgment
in the Gorgias. On the other hand, according to Gonzales the final myth of the
Republic is best understood in juxtaposition to, rather than in continuity with, the
main arguments of the Republic. The final myth gives central stage to luck, obliv-
ion, carelessness, and draws attention to the importance of external circum-
stances such as wealth and poverty, health and sickness, strength and weakness.
In Gonzalez’s own words, ‘philosophical reasoning seeks to make the choice
between good and bad clear and in our control, but the myth thematizes every-
thing that such reasoning cannot penetrate and master, everything that stub-
bornly remains dark and irrational’ (p. 272). Gonzales is not alone in showing
how myths can be in tension with arguments: Larivée and Morgan, for example,
share with Gonzales the conviction that certain myths contribute significantly
228 Critical Notice / The International Journal of the Platonic Tradition 7 (2013) 221-228

to showing how problematic embodiment really is, and call into question the
neat distinction between body and soul that one would be tempted to attribute
to Plato.
It would certainly have been useful to find a discussion of the different inter-
pretative premises underlying the contributions in this book, yet the absence of
an open exchange on matters of principle does not make it less interesting. Some
chapters are masterful in shedding light on Plato’s art of writing. From this point
of view it does not really matter whether Gonzales or Dixsaut do not agree with
Pender concerning the general function of myth with respect to argument. From
their papers readers will learn that Plato uses myths in many different ways, even
when from a general perspective the topic is the same. Carefully observing small
things is no small undertaking. Several papers in this book show how rewarding
such an approach can be.

Alessandra Fussi
University of Pisa
fussi@fls.unipi.it