When I first began teaching mythology forty odd years ago, I quickly discovered that my students were expecting a college-level story hour, something I was not inclined to provide. In many ways, that has not changed. On the internet, students can find and learn a host of charming stories, but this kind of study has never seemed to me to justify three hours of college credit. There must be more to myths than a set of interesting, fantastical stories.
The problem actually begins with the word “mythology” itself, because it combines two Greek words, mythos and logos, that for Plato seemed to define a kind of yin and yang dialectic. Both words refer to stories, but logos means stories that intend to reveal what actually happened, while mythos refers to what might have happened, or should have happened, and what it all means. A logos about the death of Socrates would tell us that on such-and-such a day, Socrates drank hemlock, a poison that he was required to drink to satisfy the death penalty he had received at his trial, and died. A mythos about the death of Socrates would build a story that would signify many things above and beyond what happened day. Plato’s dialogue, the Phaedo, should not be read as an historical account (logos) of the death of Socrates, but as a myth about the death of Socrates. But in saying that the Phaedo is a myth, I am certainly not saying or implying that it is untrue. In mythology classes, I will always point out that in ordinary language, one possible definition of “myth” is a widely held belief that is not true. This definition would make mythology essentially worthless, and we need to get past this ordinary usage of the word to justify, for example, our OCH seminar.
I would go farther, and suggest that all of the Platonic dialogues, taken together, build “the myth of Socrates.” While we know that Plato in his early 20s actually met Socrates, still, he never includes himself as a character in his dialogues. Several times one of the characters in a dialogue will mention Plato’s name, but only to remark that Plato is not present. If the author of the Symposium was not actually present when a group of friends gathered and decided, at Socrates’s suggestion, to spend their time giving speeches in praise of Eros, instead of getting drunk, then how does Plato know who said what? Truly, it does not matter. Precisely because Plato does not even pretend to worry about “documentation,” about proving or suggesting that this particular actually took place at some time or place, we can focus on the meaning of it all: the “mythical” Socrates that Plato creates is far more important than the historical Socrates.
The myths of Greek mythology at certain points (e.g. the Trojan War) may or may not reflect historical events, but this is a problem for historians of the Aegean Bronze Age. What the myths reveal about human nature, the relationship between the divine and human worlds, the nature of human emotion – these are the essential elements.