existence of the blessed gods: it defines by contrast the real lot of man.
Two outstanding questions remain. The first is that of the fate of myth in Greece after the rise of technical
philosophy and history, prose and rationalism, in the late fifth century. The mythical genealogies gave
place to a conception of history which tried to exclude the supernatural: Thucydides himself says, rather
grimly, that 'the absence of the mythical element' may make his History less immediately enjoyable, but
that it will be the more instructive. The cosmic speculations of myth gave place to philosophy, and the
Presocratics, whose minds still naturally worked in a quasi-mythical way, are rejected for that very
reason. Aristotle can say coolly that 'Hesiod and the theological writers were concerned only with what
seemed plausible to themselves, and had no respect for us... But it is not worth taking seriously writers
who show off in the mythical style; as for those who do proceed by proving their assertions, we must
cross-examine them...' (Metaphysics, 2. 1000 a 9.). When we add to this the moral criticism of the content
of the myths, which had been vocal for at least a century, and which led Plato to demand that the myths be
radically censored, it is clear that time had run out for myth as the vehicle of serious thought. Mythos now
becomes opposed to logos: a 'story', an 'old wives' tale', as opposed to a 'rational account', 'a definition'.
Plato invented his own myths. Some of them are indeed memorable, but they are radically different from
the old ones, and carefully scrutinized by their inventor for impropriety or pessimism. The old myths were
kept alive in local cults; they continued to haunt poetry, from the Hymns of Callimachus to the
Dionysiaca of Nonnus in the fifth century A.D., and to form the main subject matter of painting and
sculpture; in Latin poetry, too, the Greek myths had a great future, from the frivolity of Ovid to the
seriousness of the Aeneid. But the natural medium of serious argument is now prose; and mythology, and
poetry with it, was more and more an ornament-admittedly a beloved and indispensable one- rather than
the serious thing which it had been before 400 B.C.
The second of our outstanding questions is that of the analysis of the myths. This chapter has been
suggesting that myths are of different kinds and various origins, and that they did not all serve one
purpose; that there is, in fact, no Key to all Mythologies. It still remains possible that some myths may be
deciphered, analysed, and (in the structuralist phrase) 'decoded'. If we renounce the idea of one key to all
myths, is it true that each individual myth can be definitively analysed?