Table Of ContentPlato’s Mythoi
Political Theory for Today
Series Editor: Richard Avramenko, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Political Theory for Today seeks to bring the history of political thought out of the jargon-
filled world of the academy into the everyday world of social and political life. The series
brings the wisdom of texts and the tradition of political philosophy to bear on salient issues
of our time, especially issues pertaining to human freedom and responsibility, the relation-
ship between individuals and the state, the moral implications of public policy, health and
human flourishing, public and private virtues, and more. Great thinkers of the past have
thought deeply about the human condition and their situations—books in Political Theory
for Today build on that insight.
Titles Published
Tradition v. Rationalism: Voegelin, Oakeshott, Hayek, and Others,
edited by Gene Callahan and Lee Trepanier
Democracy and Its Enemies: The American Struggle for the Enlightenment, by
Paul N. Goldstene
Plato’s Mythoi: The Political Soul’s Drama Beyond, by Donald H. Roy
Plato’s Mythoi
The Political Soul’s Drama Beyond
Donald H. Roy
LEXINGTON BOOKS
Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
Published by Lexington Books
An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowman.com
6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom
Copyright © 2018 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,
without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available
ISBN 978-1-4985-7157-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4985-7158-6 (electronic)
∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Preface ix
Introduction xi
1 Metaphor and Analogy 1
2 Logos and Mythos in Plato’s Dialogues 39
3 The Integral Relationship and Circular Sequence
of Plato’s Mythoi 89
4 The Mythoi of Crisis, Conversion, and Descent/Ascent 137
5 The Mythoi of Judgment and Return to Political/Cosmic
Foundations 191
6 Epilogue: Mythoi in All Their Nobility: The Pathos
of Mythos 261
Appendix A: Circular Motion of Cosmos: Dialogues
Imitating the Procession of the Gods 301
Appendix B: Occlusion by Way of Reduction: The Issue
of Exegesis 303
Appendix C: God (theos), Gods (theoi), and the Divine (theios) 307
Bibliography 309
Index 319
About the Author 331
v
Acknowledgments
Perhaps I should acknowledge all those whose labors I never quite agreed
with, since they spurred me on to take on this work. But especially I must
acknowledge Professor Voegelin who once scolded me out of my doldrums
in a seminar class with him. If only I had been able to communicate more
directly with him since then and also via his extraordinary colleague and
friend Professor Niemeyer. Maybe lost opportunities keep a person restless
over the years, within those abiding earthly tensions in-between.
vii
Preface
From 1970 to 1972 I studied at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland,
with emphasis on moral philosophy and the ancient Greek language. Many
a day I trudged to the St. Andrews library to work on translating Plato’s
dialogues, especially Plato’s mythoi, with the help of my trusty old Liddell
and Scott. Disappointingly, the faculty of moral philosophy at St. Andrews
at that time seemed more dedicated to understanding Plato and Aristotle in
modern, British terms, “exemplifying a kind of British cultural imperialism
in the form of a strictly dominant, analytical philosophy.” British cultural
imperialism now in the form of the strictly dominant, analytical philosophy.
Nevertheless, this was a good, rigorous mental exercise for me, but I did not
see how I could do justice to Plato under these foreign, anachronistic terms.
Today, logocentric constructivism persists.
So, I left St. Andrews for Notre Dame and sometime thereafter I had a
conversional turning point: why was I, in Aristotelian fashion, trying to
categorize and classify Plato’s mythoi, which in any case many others had
already done? I was especially overcome by the disturbing dilemma of deal-
ing with the artistry of Plato’s mythoi on non-mythical, classificatory terms,
no longer being true to the dynamic of mythos itself. What sort of interpreta-
tion would be true to the mythical, instead of conceptual categories of logical
abstraction? At the same time, I was impressed by Paul Shorey and Friedrich
Schleiermacher who contended that Plato’s body of writings constituted a
unity, a whole, which should not be chopped up by an analytical butcher
who reduces Plato’s life work to disparate parts, which aggregately are still
less than the whole. Plato himself never lost sight of the whole, even while
dialectically dissecting. That was when I chose to put the functioning of all
Platonic mythoi in a continuum from the humblest to the most majestic (their
status). Likewise, I discerned the resort to mythos in terms of a language
ix
