In 'Logoi and Muthoi', William Wians builds on his earlier volume 'Logos and Muthos' (ISBN 9781438427362), highlighting the richness and complexity of these terms that were once set firmly in opposition to one another as reason versus myth or rationality versus irrationality. It was once common to think of intellectual history representing a straightforward progression from mythology to rationality. These volumes, however, demonstrate the value of taking the two together, opening up and analyzing a range of interactions, reactions, tensions, and ambiguities arising between literary and philosophical forms of discourse, including philosophical themes in works not ordinarily considered in the canon of Greek philosophical texts. This new volume considers such topics as the pre-philosophical origins of Anaximander's calendar, the philosophical significance of public performance and claims of poetic inspiration, and the complex role of mythic figures (including perhaps Socrates) in Plato. Taken together, the essays offer new approaches to familiar texts and open up new possibilities for understanding the roles and relationships between 'muthos' and 'logos' in ancient Greek thought.

• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
  • About the Cover
• From Logos and Muthos to . . .
  • Story vs. Argument
  • Beyond Cosmology: Pedagogy and Authority
  • Reception and Revision
  • Myth as Narrative Construction
  • Notes
• 1. Xenia, Hiketeia, and the Homeric Language of Morals: The Origins of Western Ethics
  • Two Definitions
  • Xenia and the Catalyst of The World of Odysseus
  • Homer’s Emotive Language of Morals
  • Odyssey I: In the Form of a Xenos
  • Odyssey 3 and 4: Telemachus as a Xenos
  • On to Sparta
  • Odyssey 5 and 6: Virtual Supplication
  • Odyssey 7: Transformation from Hiketês to Xenos
  • Odyssey 8: At the Table of Xenia
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
• 2. The Muses’ Faithful Servant: Moral Knowledge in Homer, Hesiod, and Xenophanes
  • Inspiration and Skepticism
  • Faithful Servants
  • The Poet-Philosopher
  • Notes
• 3. How Philosophy is Rooted in Tradition: Stories Describing the Appearance of Man and Woman in Ancient Greece
  • Hesiodic Myths
    • First Sequence: Bloody Sacrifice
    • Second Sequence: The Theft of Fire
    • Third Sequence: The Gift of Woman
    • Fourth Sequence: The Opening of the Jar
  • Orphism
  • Plato’s Aristophanes
  • Consequences at the Level of Ethics
  • Appendix
  • Notes
• 4. Muthos and Logos on New Year’s Day: Trial and Error in Anaximander’s Seasonal Sundial
  • The Calendar and New Year’s Day
  • The Development of Anaximander’s Sundial: Trials and Errors and Experimental Techniques
  • The Logoi of Anaximander’s Prose Book: Trial and Error and the Architect’s Logoi
  • Notes
• 5. Tragic Values in Homer and Sophocles
  • The World-Order in Hesiod’s Theogony
  • Homer
    • Mortality and Heroism in Homer
    • The Justice of Strife
    • Homeric Behavior
    • Odysseus
    • Limits and Care
  • Oedipus and Tragedy
  • Plato and Greek Poetry
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
• 6. Sketches of Oedipus in Sophocles’s Play about Tyranny
  • Introduction
  • I. Painting the Background: Philology, Semantics, History
  • II. Vision and Blindness
  • III. Power and Weakness
  • IV. Humanity, Divinity, Monstrosity
  • V. The Sphinx
  • VI. Knowledge, Reflection, and Self-Knowledge
  • VII. Passivity, Receptivity, and the Role of Fate
  • VIII. Oedipus and Ancient Athens
  • IX. Oedipus Today
  • Notes
• 7. Helen and the Divine Defense: Homer, Gorgias, Euripides
  • Homer
  • Gorgias
  • Euripides
  • Notes
• 8. The Hero and the Saint: Sophocles’s Antigone and Plato’s Socrates
  • Antigone: Early, Middle, Late
    • The Early Antigone: The Defiant Period (1−581)
    • The Middle Antigone: The Conciliatory Interlude (806−943)
    • The Late Antigone: Resignation and Return (1220−022)
  • Antigone and the Gods
  • Antigone’s Heroism
  • The Saintly Socrates
  • Socrates as Hero
  • Where Socrates Differs
  • Socrates and the Gods
  • Piety without God
  • Notes
• 9. Myth and Argument in Glaucon’s account of Gyges’s Ring and Adeimantus’s Use of Poetry
  • Notes
• 10. Myth Inside the Walls: Er and the Argument of the Republic
  • A New Platonic Hero
  • Er and the Temptation to Tyranny
  • Cephalus in Hades
  • Tragedy and Responsibility
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
• 11. Priam’s Despair and Courage: An Aristotelian Reading of Fear, Hope, and Suffering in Homer’s Iliad
  • Aristotle, Hesiod, and Aeschylus on Fear, Hope, and Suffering
  • Understanding Priam’s Fear and Hope: The Petition of Hector in Book 22
  • Aristotle on Courage and Priam’s Courageous Mission to Achilles in Book 24
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
• 12. Poets as Philosophers and Philosophers as Poets: Parmenides, Plato, Lucretius, and Wordsworth
  • An Impassioned Expression of Science?
  • The Visionary Philosopher
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
• Bibliography
• About the Contributors
• Index