Palaephatus was not the first Greek writer to criticize myth. Hecataeus of Miletus had already opened his work with the famous claim that the stories of the Greeks were “many and laughable.” Similar impulses appear in earlier historians, such as Herodotus and, in a more playful way, in Plato’s discussion of rationalizing myth in the Phaedrus. Palaephatus, however, is distinctive because he made this form of explanation the subject of an entire work. On Unbelievable Tales is, in fact, our earliest surviving extended text devoted to the systematic rationalization of myth. One prominent scholar of mythography has even argued that Palaephatus provides the very first theory of myth per se.[1] It should be cautioned, however, that Palaephatus’s theory pertains only to unbelievable myths. Later authors will continue in this tradition of myth rationalization in a more expansive manner.[2]
Palaephatus’s theory of how these unbelievable myths came about may have Aristotelian roots and rests on the assumption that the basic forms, kinds, species of things have always existed and always will exist. The species of a horse, for example, always was and always will be, even though particular horses are born and die. This is already a broadly Peripatetic idea. What is distinctive is the way Palaephatus turns it into a theory of myth. For him, myths cannot be true if they describe things that violate the stable order of nature. Centaurs, for instance, cannot have existed as hybrid creatures, because there is no such natural species of horse-men. Yet Palaephatus does not simply dismiss myths as lies. Instead, he assumes that each unbelievable story began from something real. The unbelievable notion of horse-men, for instance, was afforded by the misidentification of the first horsemen.
The method of rationalization in On Unbelievable Tales is remarkably consistent, and, from a certain perspective, remarkably modern. First, the author introduces a familiar myth. Next, he provides a rationalized account of what “really” happened. In the course of this rationalization, he identifies, or at least suggests, the word or phrase or image that introduced an ambiguity. For example, the phrase χαλκοῦν τεῖχος, Palaephatus suggests, originally referred to a shield wall, but can also signify the implausible form of walls made entirely of bronze. Unbelievable myths arise when this type of ambiguity is resolved in the wrong direction. All of the unbelievable myths treated by Palaephatus are shown to arise from this same type of semiotic alchemy.
[1] Lowell Edmunds, Greek Myth (De Gruyter Brill, 2021), p. 60.
[2] For a review of this entire tradition of myth rationalization, see Greta Hawes, Rationalizing Myth in Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2014).