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Between Myth and History or the Weaknesses of Greek Reason
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
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Did the Greeks believe in their mythology? The answer is difficult, for “believe” means so many things… Not everyone believed that Minos continued to be a judge in Hell or that Theseus defeated the Minotaur, and they knew that poets “lie.” Nevertheless, their manner of not believing gave reason for concern, for Theseus was no less real in their eyes. It is simply necessary to “purify myth with reason’“ and to reduce the biography of the companion of Hercules to its historic kernel. As for Minos, after a prodigious mental effort, Thucydides extracts the same kernel from his subject: “Of all those whom we know only by hearsay, Minos was the first to have a fleet.” The father of Phaedra, the husband of Pasiphaë is nothing more than a king who was master of the sea. The purification of the mythical by the logos is not an episode in the eternal struggle, from the beginning to Voltaire and Renan, between superstition and reason, a struggle which was the glory of Greek genius. The myth and the logos, despite Nestle, are not simple opposites like truth and error. Myth was a subject of serious reflections, and the Greeks had not yet finished with it six centuries after the Sophist movement which has been called their Aufklärung. Far from being a triumph of reason, the purging of myth by logos is a very dated program whose absurdity is surprising. Why did the Greeks make themselves unhappy for nothing by seeking to separate the wheat from the chaff instead of rejecting in one gesture the fantasy of both Theseus and the Minotaur, the very existence of a fabulous Minos as well as the implausible qualities with which the myth endows this Minos?
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- Copyright © 1981 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
References
1 Plutarch, Life of Theseus, I, 5.
2 W. Nestle, Vom Mythos zum Logos, 1940. This wonderful book is worthy of praise; it appeared in 1940 and is full of allusions (see, for example, p. 432, the praise of Anonymous of Jamblik) which attest to the intellectual courage of the author.
3 G. Huppert, L'idée de l'histoire parfaite, tr. Braudel, Nouvelle Bibliothèque scientifique, 1973; below we cite page 7.
4 Cited by Huppert, p. 7, n. 1. The different essays of Momigliano relative to these problems of history and the method of historiography can now be found conveniently in his two collections, Studies in Historiography, New York 1966, and Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography, Oxford, 1977.
5 To see how “rigor,” “method,” “critical use of sources” are really of little use in these areas, it is sufficient to cite these lines where, in 1838, V. Leclerc attempts to refute Niebuhr: “To proscribe the history of a century because there are fables mixed in with it is to proscribe the history of all centuries. The first centuries of Rome seem suspect to us because of the she-wolf of Romulus, the shields of Numa, the apparition of Castor and Pollux. Efface afterwards from Roman history the entire history of Caesar because of the star which appeared at his death, and the history of Augustus since he was said to be the son of Apollo disguised as a serpent” (Des journaux chez les Romains, p. 166). From this we see that the scepticism of Beaufort and Niebuhr was not based on the distinction between primary and secondary sources, but on the biblical criticism of thinkers of the eighteenth century.
6 Truth is anonymous, only error is personal. In certain societies this principle is pushed quite far. Cf. Renan on the formation of the Pentateuch (Oeuvres complètes, vol. VI, p. 520): “High antiquity did not have the idea of the authenticity of a book; everyone wanted his copy to be complete and so made whatever additions were necessary to keep it up-to-date. At this time a text was not recopied, it was redone in combination with other documents. Every book was composed with an absolute objectivity, without a title, without the name of the author, constantly transformed, subject to endless additions.” Today, in India, popular editions of the Upanishads are published, texts which are one or two thousand years old but naively adjusted in order to be true; the discovery of electricity is mentioned. It is not a matter of falsification; if one completes or corrects a book which is simply true like a telephone directory, there is no falsification. In other words, at stake here is not the notion of truth, but the notion of author.
7 No more so than Thucydides (II, 15), in fact, does Aristotle doubt the historicity of Theseus; he sees in him the founder of Athenian democracy (Politics, XLI, 2) and makes believable the myth of the Athenian children carried off to Crete and given to the Minotaur (Const, of the Bottians, cited by Plutarch, Theseus, 16, 2).
8 Here is an example. Newton said that the seven kings of Rome ruled altogether for 244 years and realized that such longevity is without parallel in all history where the average length of a reign is 17 years. He could have thus concluded that the chronology of royal Rome was legendary; instead he merely concludes that it was false, adjusts it to seven times 17 years and thereby fixes the date of the foundation of Rome at 630 B.C. See Isaac Newton, The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms, 1728.
9 M. Nilsson, Geschichte der griech. Religion, Second edition, Vol. I, pp. 14 and 371; A.D. Nock, Essays on Religion and the Ancient World, Oxford, 1972, Vol. I, p. 261. I am not even sure that aetiological myths should be set apart; very few Greek myths explain rituals, and those that do are less the invention of priests who seek to found a rite than the imagination of ingenious local minds who have invented a romantic explanation for such and such cultic particularity which intrigued the people of the area and travelers. The ritual is explained by a myth, but in the same way as any other local curiosity such as a strange rock formation which would lead a local story-teller to invent an explanation. It is also useless to seek to distinguish between the myth, the tale and the legend according to the degree of truth which is accorded to these different genres or according to their respective relationship to religion. See F. Hampl, Geschichte als kritische Wissenschaft, Darmstadt, 1975, Vol. II, pp. 1-50: Mythos; Sage, Märchen. For Greek myths everything was renewed by the works of J. P. Vernand, Les origines de la pensée grecque, 1962; Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs, 1965; of M. I. Finley “Myth, Memory and History” in the review History and Theory, IV, 1965, P. 281; of M. Detienne, Les maîtres de vérité dans la Grèce archaïque, 1967. Here I treat very superficially this mythic thinking since my subject is its transformation in the last centuries before Christ.
10 A. van Gennep, Religions, moeurs et légendes, III, p. 150; Emile Male, L'art religieux du XIIIe siècle en France, p. 269; L'art religieux de la fin du XVIe siècle… étude sur l'iconographie après le Concile de Trente, p. 132.
11 Cf. Veyne, Pain et Cirque, p. 589.
12 Saint Augustine, for example, does not doubt the historicity of Aeneas, but he reduces the myth to historic verisimilitude: Aeneas was no more son of Venus than Romulus was son of Mars (City of God, I, 4 and III, 2-6).
13 The plurality of modes of belief is a fact too well-known to insist on it here; see J. Piaget, La formation du symbole chez l'enfant, p. 177. Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, Vol. I, p. 232, “On Multiple Realities”; cf. Vol. II, p. 135, “Don Quixote and the Problem of Reality”; Pierre Janet, De l'angoisse à l'extase, Vol. I, p. 244. It is no less true that we can believe different things about the same object at the same time; children know that toys are brought by Santa Claus and at the same time that they are given by their parents. T. Piaget, Le fugement et le raisonnement chez l'enfant, p. 217, cf. p. 325: “In children there are several heterogeneous realities: play, the observable reality, the world of things heard and told, etc.; these realities are more or less incoherent and independent of one another. When the child passes from the state of work to the state of play or from the state of submission to the adult word to the state of a personal examination, his opinions can vary significantly.” M. Nilsson, Geschichte der griech. Religion, Vol. I, p. 50: “A child of thirteen years who is splashing in a brook with thousands of tiny waves says, ‘The brook is wrinkling his brows.’ If such an expression was taken literally, this would be a myth. But the child still knew that the brook was water that it could be drunk, etc. In the same way a primitive person can see souls everywhere in nature, he can situate in a tree a sentient and acting force which he must please or honor. But again, he will still cut down the tree to use its wood for building or for burning”; cf. also Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Vol I, p. 245. Wolfgang Leonard, Die Revolution entlässt ihre Kinder, Ullstein Bücher, 1955, p. 58 (the author is 19 years old and was komsomol at the time of the Great Purge of 1937): “My mother had been arrested, I had assisted at the arrest of my professor and my friends and I had of course noted for a long time that the Soviet reality bore no resemblance whatsoever to the manner in which it was described in Pravda. But in a certain way I separated these things, i.e. my personal expressions and experiences from my political convictions of principle. It was a little as if there had been two levels: the one of daily events or of my own experience (where it was not rare that I manifested a critical spirit) and another level which was that of the general Party line which I continued to hold as correct despite a certain feeling of unease. I think many komsomols knew a similar division.” It seems that in no way was myth taken for history, that the difference was abolished between legend and history, despite E. Köhler, L'aventure chevaie- resque: idéal et réalité dans le monde courtois, p. 8. Let us say rather that they can believe in it as much as in history, but not in the place of history nor under the same conditions as history. Children do not require of their parents powers of levitation, ubiquity and invisibility which they attribute to Santa Claus. Children, primitives and believers of all kinds are not naive. “Even primitives do not confuse an imaginary relation with a real relation” (Evans Pritchard, La religion des Primitifs, p. 49); “The symbolism of the Huichol allows an identity between wheat and a stag; M. Lévy-Brühl prefers not to call this symbolism but rather prelogical thinking. But the logic of the Huichol would only be prelogical on the day when they baked bread thinking they were making a venison stew” (Olivier Leroy, La raison primitive, Paris, 1927, p. 70); “The Sedang Moi of Indochina, who have instituted means by which a man can renounce his status of human being and become a wild boar, still react differently depending on whether they are dealing with a real boar or a nominal boar” (G. Deveureux, Ethnopsychanalyse complémentariste, 1972, p. 101); “For the Dorze, the leopard is a Christian animal which respects the fasts of the Coptic Church. A Dorze, however, is no less careful to protect his animals on Wednesday and Friday, fast days, than the other days of the week. He holds as true that leopards fast, and that they are dangerous every day. These two propositions have never been challenged: leopards are dangerous every day as we know from experience. They are Christian and fast since tradition guarantees it.” (Dan Sperber, Le symbolisme en général, 1974, pp. 105 and 112); “Despite verbal traditions, we rarely accept a myth in the same way we accept empirical truth. All the doctrines which have grown up around the subject of the immortality of the soul have hardly affected man's natural feeling in the face of death” (G. Santayana, The Life of Reason, III, Reason in Religion, 1905, p. 52).
14 Hermann Frankel, Wege und Formen frühgriech. Denkens, p. 366.
15 The most current idea of historic time is not at all that of cyclical time nor rectilinear time nor progressive time, but the idea that world is completed and finished and that consequently it can only grow older. We are living the period of old age of the world. See references in Veyne, Comment on écrit l'histoire, p. 91 (pocket edition, p. 57). This idea gives us the key to a phrase discussed in the Laws of Plato, 677 C. The world, says Plato, is periodically destroyed by cataclysms which annihilate all civilization and almost all of humanity. “Otherwise, if we suppose that there is truly a constant permanence of all human acquisitions in the world, how could there still be discoveries?” For Plato, discovery, or rather invention, is not infinite. If we are still discovering it is because the stock of discoveries has been partially destroyed and there is need to reconstitute it.
16 Toward 1873 the young philologist Nietzsche wrote, “With what poetic liberty the Greeks treated their gods! We have too much taken on the habit of opposing in history truth and non-truth. If we imagine that it is absolutely necessary that the Christian myths appear historically authentic! … Man demands truth and manifests it in ethical commerce with other men. All collective life rests on that; the evil effects of reciprocal lies are anticipated. It is there that the obligation to speak truly is born. But untruth is permitted the epic narrator because there is no harmful consequence to fear there. The lie is thus permitted where it provides charm: as long as it does not harm the beauty and grace of the lie! This is how the priest invents the myths of the gods; nutruth serves to prove that the gods are sublime. We have a very great difficulty in revivifying the mythical idea of the freedom to lie. The great Greek philosophers still lived completely in the era of the right to lie (Berechtigung zur Lüge). The search for truth is an acquisition which mankind made very slowly” (Philosophenbuch, 44 and 70, in Vol. X of the Kröner edition).
17 Dion Cassius, LXXIX, 18, in 221 was the witness in Asia to the following incident in which he believed fully: “A daimon who called himself the famous Alexander of Macedonia and who resembled him physically and was armed like him as well, arose in the Danube regions. Where he appeared exactly, I do not know. He crossed (Mesia?) and Thrace acting like Dionysius, with 400 men carrying thyrsus and a nebris who harmed no one.” The crowds thronged, led by the governors and procurators.
18 Pausanias, VII, 2, 6-7.
19 The admirable second chapter of Deux sources de la morale et de la religion remains one of the great texts of human sciences on the function of fantasy. See pp. 111-114, 124-134, 204-212.
20 Fontenelle, De l'origine des fables in Oeuvres diverses, Amsterdam, 1742, Vol. I, p. 481-500. For Fontenelle, myth contains no truth, but fantasy does not exist either. All is explained by the fateful encounter of a number of innocent threads: ignorance, enthusiasm, the pleasure of weaving an anecdote, the vanity of an author, normal curiosity, etc. There are not two camps, the deceivers and the naive; all men are their own dupes. All is made up of tiny threads and not of large channels.
21 G. Granger, La théorie aristotélicienne de la science, Paris, 1976, p. 374.
22 Plato, Republic, 377 D.
23 Republic, 378 D and 382 D.
24 Machiavelli, The Prince, chapter VI; Discourses on Titus-Livius, III, 30. See also the Contra Apionem of Josephus, 157, et seq. (note in chapter 160 the idea that religion helped Moses make the people docile).
25 M. Riffaterre, La production du texte, Paris, 1979, p. 176: “All the efforts of philology were directed toward the reconstruction of realities which had disappeared for fear that the poem die with its references.”
26 M. Foucault, Les Mots et les choses, p. 55 and 141 on the sciences of the sixteenth century: “The great partition, apparently so simple, between observation, testimony and fable did not exist…. To write the story of an animal, it was useless and impossible to choose between the profession of naturalist and that of the compiler. It was necessary to collect in one and the same form of knowledge all that had been seen and heard, all that had been told.”
27 The reader who enjoys these things should read Yves-Paul Pezron, L'antiquité des temps rétablie et défendue contre les Juifs et les nouveaux chronologistes, Paris, 1687, where he will learn that in 2538 from the creation of the world, Jupiter had three children by Europa. For Dom Calmet, his universal history appeared in 1735, to the great joy of Voltaire. I was referred to Pezron by G. Couton's very good article, as hard on the Pascalian hagiography and on Pascal the apologist as Koyre was on Pascal the physician: “Libertinage et apologétique: les ‘Pensées de Pascal’ contre la thèse des Trois Imposteurs”, in Dix-septième siècle, XXXII, 1980, p. 181.