definitions

  • story used to describe a phenomena
  • commonly-believed misconception
    • vs. fact
  • legendary, grandiose, exceeding expectations of everyday
  • educational: lesson, moral, point
  • fictional: push the envelope of the truth

evolution of mythos

ancient Greek root for myth

Homeric Poems

📌 mythos as an authoritative utterance

  • c. 750–700 BCE
  • Homer: blind poet from Kios
    • probably no historical figure
    • product of oral tradition
      • culture of storytelling
      • improvisation
  • epic poems, mythical stories of Greek heroes
  • The Iliad: Greeks in siege of Troy
    • Achilles’s dispute with Agamemnon
    • 1.20–32 translates mythos as stern command
      • statement
      • threat
      • prediction about future, unsavory events
      • malicious
      • taunt, gloating
      • hierarchical differentiation — king vs. priest
  • The Odyssey: return from Troy
    • Odysseus’s return to Penelope and Telemachus
    • 1.353–61 translates mythos as deliberate scolding
      • hierarchical differentiation — Telemachus establishes himself as patriarch of the house
        • insulting
      • aggressive
        • not necessarily polite
      • intentional
      • orders (sending away)
      • demands and declarations
      • authoritative utterances

Hecataeus of Miletus

📌 mythos as something reliable, with truth, with idea of authority; logos as a foolish, common story

  • early Greek geographer and historian, early 5th century BCE
  • distinction between mythos and logos
    • mytheitai: utters a mythos
      • mythos: something that he agrees with
        • related to credibility, authority
        • social condescension
        • self-granted authority
    • logoi: stories

Herodotus

  • c. 484–425 BCE
  • born in Halicarnassus
    • Asia Minor (Turkey)
  • The Histories
    • events up to Persian Wars
    • the Father of History
      • first historian with surviving works in Western intellectual tradition
  • 1.5 translates logos as history
    • truth
    • reason
    • objective verification
  • 2.23 translates mythos as opinion grounded in obscurity
    • no eyewitness account to be sure ofg
    • not logical
  • stabilization of this pair of terms in modern etymology

definition of a classical myth

  1. traditional story set in distant past
    • broad ideas of time and history
  2. offers its tellers and audiences ways to think through the nature of the world and the dilemmas of human existence