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
- hierarchical differentiation — Telemachus establishes himself as patriarch of the house
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
- mythos: something that he agrees with
- logoi: stories
- mytheitai: utters a mythos
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
- traditional story set in distant past
- broad ideas of time and history
- offers its tellers and audiences ways to think through the nature of the world and the dilemmas of human existence