“Palaephatus,” Strabo, and the Boundaries of Myth

Abstract

One of the principal problems confronting anyone concerned with the ancient critical reception of Homer and/or the broader question of how the Greeks began to construct distinctions in what they heard and read between history, fiction, and myth, or indeed between science and non-science, is that it is very difficult to get back to a “state of grace”: most of our ancient texts in these areas seem already contaminated by sophistications of one kind or another. That, however, may well be the point: there may never have been such a pure state, at least in the historical period covered by our extant texts. Rather, therefore, than trying to distinguish between Archaic texts, which come from a world that still understood, indeed functioned through, poetry and myth, and postclassical texts which had lost their intellectual virginity and for whom all this was play, I want to begin in mediis rebus with a text that is relatively early (late fourth century BCE), but also—when viewed from another perspective—seems very late indeed.