Mythos & Logos

Mythos and logos name two modes of speech: mythos, the traditional tale, the story handed down; and logos, the reasoned account that gives proofs and causes. Modern scholars once told the rise of philosophy as a clean passage 'from mythos to logos' — from the gods of Homer to the arguments of the Milesians, from story to science.

Yet the line is far less clean than that story suggests, and nowhere less so than in Plato, who, master of argument though he is, turns to myth at the very heights of his thought — the Myth of Er, the charioteer, the making of the world in the Timaeus — to say what argument alone cannot. For the Neoplatonists, myth and reason were not rivals but partners, the one veiling in image what the other unfolds in thought, to be reconciled by allegory.