been preserved, he writes that “Hesiod says that Aegyptus had fifty children; I think he had fewer than twenty.” Setting himself against the authority of inherited tradition and the great poets, Hecataeus attacked mythology by insisting on the same standards of plausibility that we observe in the world around us. No one in early fifth-century Miletus had fifty children; why should a mythological king of Egypt have been any different? 14
We can get a flavor of how Hecataeus and his like proceeded from a curious surviving text that followed him down this rationalizing path, written perhaps some 150 years later. We know next to nothing about Palaephatus, its author; the assumption that he was an Athenian writing in the late fourth century BC is little more than a guess, based on various bits of evidence in a medieval encyclopedia. 15 But scholarly difficulties aside, the text is a wonderful example of the filtration of myth through a rational system. Here he is, for example, on centaurs:
What is said about the Centaurs is that they were beasts with the overall shape of a horse—except for the head, which was human. But even if there are some people who believe that such a beast once existed, it is impossible. Horse and human natures are not compatible, nor are their foods the same; what a horse eats could not pass through the mouth and throat of a man. And if there ever had been such a shape, it would also exist today. 16
Palaephatus interprets the mythological stories about centaurs instead as a mangled memory of the first horse riders, adding the detail that they were so named because they had taken to horseback to kill bulls (an etymological pun: bulls are
tauroi
). This delightful inventiveness is typical of the author. The passage also reveals a lot about how the relationship between past and present could be imagined. At one level, nature is conceived of as unchanging throughout the ages (a reasonable pre-Darwinian assumption): a horse would at no point in the past have been able to digest human food. But human beings have (in Palaephatus’s mind) clearly developed intellectually over time. In the past, humans expressed themselves symbolically through myth; nowadays, however, we respect the physical laws of the world and grasp the impossibility of breaking them.
There is a kind of schizophrenia to this attitude. Although he rejects myth as a narrative form that can admit supernatural elements, Palaephatus still thinks that myths must have, as the English cliché goes, a “kernel of truth” to them that can be rescued. This is not so far from the modern practice of taking (for example) the biblical story of the parting of the Red Sea to reflect a folk memory of a real tsunami, or the story of Atlantis as a recollection of the Santorini volcanic eruption. Although he casts himself as a skeptical modern, Palaephatus is not ready to let go of the past. His standard method is to report the familiar version of a myth and then to counter “the truth is as follows…” There is
always
a truth hidden in mythology somewhere, no matter how deeply. 17
Epic myth was the Greeks’ collective memory. It was unthinkable to reject it entirely: not because it was sacred, but because the past defined who the Greeks were. But figures like Palaephatus also thought of themselves as separated by a huge intellectual gulf from the more naïve world that produced such stories. That separation was marked by different attitudes toward the divine. Palaephatus was not quite a disbeliever, but gods play an extremely minimal role in his worldview. There are only eight references in the forty-five chapters, six of which are banal, incidental, and insignificant. Only in two cases does he seem, at least on first sight, to express some kind of belief. In myth, the hunter Actaeon glimpses Artemis bathing, and she exacts revenge by turning him into a deer, whereupon his own hounds maul him to death. To prove the implausibility of this story,
We can get a flavor of how Hecataeus and his like proceeded from a curious surviving text that followed him down this rationalizing path, written perhaps some 150 years later. We know next to nothing about Palaephatus, its author; the assumption that he was an Athenian writing in the late fourth century BC is little more than a guess, based on various bits of evidence in a medieval encyclopedia. 15 But scholarly difficulties aside, the text is a wonderful example of the filtration of myth through a rational system. Here he is, for example, on centaurs:
What is said about the Centaurs is that they were beasts with the overall shape of a horse—except for the head, which was human. But even if there are some people who believe that such a beast once existed, it is impossible. Horse and human natures are not compatible, nor are their foods the same; what a horse eats could not pass through the mouth and throat of a man. And if there ever had been such a shape, it would also exist today. 16
Palaephatus interprets the mythological stories about centaurs instead as a mangled memory of the first horse riders, adding the detail that they were so named because they had taken to horseback to kill bulls (an etymological pun: bulls are
tauroi
). This delightful inventiveness is typical of the author. The passage also reveals a lot about how the relationship between past and present could be imagined. At one level, nature is conceived of as unchanging throughout the ages (a reasonable pre-Darwinian assumption): a horse would at no point in the past have been able to digest human food. But human beings have (in Palaephatus’s mind) clearly developed intellectually over time. In the past, humans expressed themselves symbolically through myth; nowadays, however, we respect the physical laws of the world and grasp the impossibility of breaking them.
There is a kind of schizophrenia to this attitude. Although he rejects myth as a narrative form that can admit supernatural elements, Palaephatus still thinks that myths must have, as the English cliché goes, a “kernel of truth” to them that can be rescued. This is not so far from the modern practice of taking (for example) the biblical story of the parting of the Red Sea to reflect a folk memory of a real tsunami, or the story of Atlantis as a recollection of the Santorini volcanic eruption. Although he casts himself as a skeptical modern, Palaephatus is not ready to let go of the past. His standard method is to report the familiar version of a myth and then to counter “the truth is as follows…” There is
always
a truth hidden in mythology somewhere, no matter how deeply. 17
Epic myth was the Greeks’ collective memory. It was unthinkable to reject it entirely: not because it was sacred, but because the past defined who the Greeks were. But figures like Palaephatus also thought of themselves as separated by a huge intellectual gulf from the more naïve world that produced such stories. That separation was marked by different attitudes toward the divine. Palaephatus was not quite a disbeliever, but gods play an extremely minimal role in his worldview. There are only eight references in the forty-five chapters, six of which are banal, incidental, and insignificant. Only in two cases does he seem, at least on first sight, to express some kind of belief. In myth, the hunter Actaeon glimpses Artemis bathing, and she exacts revenge by turning him into a deer, whereupon his own hounds maul him to death. To prove the implausibility of this story,
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