The Artificiality of Myth

His lack of understanding for a short time, as is necessary.

For rhetorical arts clearly show that a myth is a fabrication composed for entertainment toward some use differing from life; and a fabrication is said to be 'made' from the very fact that it is composed in agreement with itself; for it would no longer be called a myth if it were actually true.

If, however, it is a composition of spontaneous fabrication or myth-making, it may be proven true in deed, but in word it depicts the substance of things with images, lacking in practice; for it seems to plausibly present non-existent things as if they were existing, and its narration introduces a fabricated imitation; therefore, it announces things that are unsubstantial, without any underlying basis being presented as if it were certain.

Moreover, it seems to me that the craft of making a myth does not differ from shadow-painting without soul; for by similarity, I think, the painting is itself characterized by the line; by a near resemblance, it personifies a hypothesis, casting aside one part, while it shapes the others through imitation with prescribed letters. Thus, it observes a lack of agreement in each of its rhythms most strictly, writing both the beginning and end of a war in a plausible manner, and the speaking lips and the peculiarities of voices, and laughter and weeping, or the authoritative speeches of a public forum, or symposia and revelries, or bacchanalia or rites, or unrestrained drinking, or erotic exhortations, or brigand raids, or unseemly destruction, or lawless slaughter, or the acting of poverty, or the flowing of wealth.

Therefore, everything is characterized by economy of expression, and through personification, it approaches and depicts idle actions; for indeed, the myth-makers, selecting words like flowers, produce various kinds of colored types and entwine them with personification; then, coloring the words with pleasures, they gather the whole narrative of the myth, just as zodiac-sign painters depict the season of the appearance, writing in red and floral colors. And they hasten to compose material characters through phrases and forms, showing them by the work of truth itself. But these people diversify the images of myths in such a varied way; from this, a certain musical harmony and a discovery of poetic composition arise.

Plato, asking unasked, defines music as being of words; he said, 'the kind of words is twofold: the true, and the false being the other; and one must be educated in both, but first in the false ones.' For he previously said that children are easily overcome by the praise of myths. 'This, so to speak, is the whole thing false, yet in it is also truth.' Is not the beginning the greatest part of every work, and moreover, is it not something new and soft? For especially then is it molded and clothed in a type, which anyone might wish to mark for each person.

Through such things, he tries to bring forth utterances as if it were not necessary to oppose the unbridled hearings of the young, since those who are currently being marked by impressions love to have the types of bad reputation become unchangeable and difficult to erase. Therefore, it follows again: 'Will we then easily provide this?' he said, 'that the children, having heard those who have succeeded by having been fashioned by a successful myth, will receive in their souls as a great part those contrary opinions which we must expect them to have when they are perfected? Not in the least,' he has said, 'we will provide it.'

First, as it seems, we must supervise the myth-makers, and approve whichever good myth they make, and reject which one not. And let us persuade the nurses and mothers to speak to the children those which are approved, and to mold their souls with myths much more than their bodies with their hands. But now they say that the many should be cast out. Then