60 SENECA FICTION, LEGENDS, AND MYTHS [bth. inn. 32 



To trace the ancestral sources of a people's thought and character, 

 a careful and critical study of the myths, and later of the mythology 

 of that people, (ii'st exclusively and then comparatively, is required. 

 This study deals with ideas and concepts exi)ressed by three well- 

 laiown Greek terms, mi/thos, epos, and logos, and also with those 

 expressed by the term resulting from the combination of the first 

 and the last of these words. These are among many words of human 

 speech which comprise all human experience and history. It is re- 

 markable also that each may be translated into English by the term 

 " word." 



The word "mythology" is a philosophic term composed of two 

 very interesting and instructive Greek words, mythos and logos. 



The first term, mythos, denoted whatever was thoughtfully ut- 

 tered by the mouth of savage and barbaric men — the expression of 

 thought which had been shut in to mature — a story of prehistoric 

 time, a naive, creative concept stated in terms of human life and 

 activity — a poem. In matters of religion and cosmogony such an 

 utterance was final and conclusive to those men. 



The second term, logos, having at the beginning approximately 

 the same meaning as mythos, became in Greek philosophic think- 

 ing the symbol or expression of the internal constitution as well as 

 the external form and sign of thought, and so became " the expres- 

 sion of exact thought — . . . exact because it corresponds to uni- 

 versal and imchanging principles," reaching " its highest exalta- 

 tion in becoming not only reason in man but the reason in the uni- 

 verse — the Divine Logos, the thought of God, the Son of God, God 

 himself" (Curtin). The logos is thus the expi-ession of the philoso- 

 phy of men measurably cultured; it is the intelligent exegesis of the 

 content of the mythos in terms of objective and subjective reality; 

 it is scientific because it is logical ; it is the later literary criticism — 

 the analytic and synthetic treatment of myths and epics. So, in the 

 experience of every people having an ethnic past, mytJios and logos 

 represent two w-ell-defined stages of human thought — the naive and 

 the philosophic — and also the elder time and the modern. So myth- 

 ology may be defined as the science or the logic of the myth; it 

 belongs to times of relatively high culture and does not flourish in 

 savagery, for savages have only myths. It may be well to note 

 that a third stage of thought is expressed in the Greek term epos, 

 which is the adornment or garbing and dramatizing of the myth 

 concepts in poetic form, in story, saga, and legend — the epic. 



Only modern research with its critical exegesis and sympathetic 

 interpretation brings down the study of the concepts of the myths 

 of the fathers measurably to the character of a science. 



The highest type of poetry expresses itself in myth, in the 

 epos, and in the logos. For men of undeveloped thought, of inchoate 



