This volume brings together ten of the most celebrated Platonic myths. They belong to eight of Plato’s dialogues, ranging from the early Protagoras and Gorgias to the late Timaeus and Critias. The myths appear here in the most probable chronological order of their composition. Although some of them contain deities and adapted themes of traditional Greek mythology—such as Phaethon, Zeus, the judgement after death, or the Isles of the Blessed—they may all be regarded as Plato’s own inventions.
These ten myths are self-contained stories. They have journeyed through more than two thousand years like ten ‘strange pilgrims’ (to borrow the English title of one of García Márquez’s collections of short stories), each one being always ready to seduce the reader into its enigmatic realm. They were not supposed to be assembled in a greater, coherent whole, but they bear upon many Platonic philosophical questions, and, taken as a whole, they form an unusual introduction to Plato’s philosophy. The reader is invited both to contemplate their imagery and to meditate on the philosophical questions they hide in this very imagery.
Hegel claimed that ‘the real value of Plato does not rest in his myths’.1 Yet regardless of where Plato’s real value lies, why would one read his myths—other than for an aesthetic reward? Plato’s most famous myth is the so-called myth of the cave, from Republic (included here under the title ‘The Cave’). In this myth men are said to be like prisoners in the heart of a deep cave. We are asked to imagine that the prisoners have their necks constrained and can look only in front of them, at some shadows projected on the wall of the cave by a fire that they cannot see. In fact, they have never seen anything but those shadows, which they believe to be real beings. At some point a prisoner manages to unfetter himself, and he realizes that what he believed to be real beings are mere shadows. Then a mysterious man guides him out of the cave, and the former prisoner sees that the real light is outside the cave, and that its origin is the sun. And the sun, Plato says, is an analogy for the ultimate principle of the entire existence, which he called in a previous section of Republic ‘the good’ (for more on this see the prefatory note that accompanies ‘The Cave’). The myth, however, is said to be an analogy for education. Indeed, education, Plato claims, is not inserting vision into blind eyes. Rather, it is turning one’s eyes from darkness to light, which involves a transformation of one’s perspective on things.
Most of us would look with suspicion at a radical reading of this myth, a reading which claims that the actual aim of one’s education is to grasp the ultimate principle of reality. A less radical reading, however, states that the main aim of education is to expose one to things that are outside one’s purview. Most of us, I suppose, would find this reading quite appealing. We know only too well that one’s immediate environment, be it popular culture or extreme specialization in an academic field, may, if not challenged by different perspectives, turn into a cave-like prison for one’s mind. A less radical reading would take the myth as implying that seeing things in new perspectives is the main goal of education. Now, this is just what what Plato’s myths do: they disrupt our familiarity with things and turn our eyes from what they have been accustomed to see to intriguing, unfamiliar landscapes. Their real value lies in their educative power.
Each myth here is accompanied by a short prefatory note that describes its context and points out its main philosophical aspects. The Introduction offers an overall account of Plato’s use of myth, gives brief accounts of two of his main philosophical theories, the so-called theories of Forms and of Recollection (to which several myths refer), and addresses the question of why Plato used so many fictional narratives and images, even though he condemned them. It also offers a bird’s-eye view of the destiny Plato’s myths had in the Platonic tradition. The Introduction is jointly written by Catalin Partenie, Luc Brisson, and John Dillon (see the note on p. xiii). Three sections of the Introduction (the first section, ‘Plato’s Myths’, and ‘Why Did Plato Write Myths?’) were written by Catalin Partenie and Luc Brisson: the former wrote his part in English, while the latter wrote his in French. Michael Chase translated the French text and also edited these three sections for the sake of consistency. Information on characters appearing or mentioned in the myths is to be found in the Explanatory Notes and the Index of Names.
Lesley Brown (L.B.) is the author of nine prefatory notes; Catalin Partenie (C.P.) is the author of one.
David Gallop, C. C. W. Taylor, and Robin Waterfield are the authors of the Explanatory Notes.
Texts for the Index of Names were severally contributed by David Gallop, Catalin Partenie, C. C. W. Taylor, and Robin Waterfield.
The Explanatory Notes and some entries in the Index of Names are taken from other editions of Plato’s dialogues in the Oxford World’s Classics series, as indicated in the Note on the Translations.
The titles of the myths are the editor’s, not Plato’s. For convenience, they are used throughout the volume for referring to the myths they name.
References to Plato’s works are followed by the Stephanus numbers and letters; these numbers and letters, which are commonly used in scholarly references to Plato’s works, refer to the pages, and their sections, of the edition by Henri Estienne (in Latin, Stephanus) of the Greek text of Plato (published in Geneva in 1578). References to the works of other ancient authors are followed by the numbers and/or letters that refer to the standard editions of these works (sometimes the name of the edition used has been indicated).
Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Plato are taken from the volumes indicated in the Note on the Translations.
I would like to thank all the contributors for their patience and encouragement. I am especially grateful to Judith Luna, editor at Oxford University Press, for her support and suggestions. I am also grateful to Lesley Brown and Michael Inwood for their comments on earlier drafts of this volume, and to Robin Waterfield and the copy-editor for all the improvements they suggested. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to the University of Quebec at Montreal and its Department of Philosophy for their support.
C.P.
Montreal
April 2003