Abstract

This paper considers the use of myth in the Platonic dialogues. It seeks to demonstrate that Plato takesup the task of rewriting the old myths, not in order to clarify the real truth about ancient tales, but to make thosetales serve higher—ethical—ends. Thus Plato makes a valiant effort to replace the old "truths" in order to displaceand overcome ethically dangerous assumptions in the old tales. But I shall demonstrate that, despite the changesin mythical content, the old tropes endure in the new form and the dangerous elements of myth persist. Theelements of myth that I consider to be most dangerous are the motifs of "fallenness" and the irredeemably tragic dimension of earthly existence . These mythologems endure despite the new imagery that seeks to overcome them and they continue to breed a "nostalgia" of loss and tragic origins. This is the archaic infection that I see as the spawning ground of ritualistic patterns of human behaviour that are essentially violent. The infection is sublimated but carried alongin new contextual forms in Platonic myth, concealed but dynamically present. The persistence of these dangerous elements, in my reading, signal the failure of the Platonic project of purification—a failure most clearly evidenced in the tragic character of Eros and in the impotence of the philosopher in the city—indeed in Socrates' being ever atopos with regard to the city and missing even from the lofty perches reserved for the philosopher and the lover . There is no place forSocrates—for the truly just and good man—in the real cities down under the heavens. No place for him in theupper world of lofty contemplations. Without him, wealth and power and honour will ever rule the human scene and justice will be the ideal of simple fools.1That is the essential tragedy of the human condition as it re-emerges in the Platonic corpus