 In the Protagoras (324d) a distinction is made between muthos and logos, where muthos appears to refer to a story and logos to an argument. This distinction seems to be echoed in the Theaetetus and the Sophist. In the Theaetetus Socrates discusses Protagoras’ main doctrine and refers to it as “the muthos of Protagoras” (164d9) (in the same line Socrates also calls Theaetetus’ defence of the identity of knowledge and perception a muthos). And later on, at 156c4, Socrates calls a muthos the teaching according to which active and passive motions generate perception and perceived objects. In the Sophist, the Visitor from Elea tells his interlocutors that Xenophanes, Parmenides and other Eleatic, Ionian (Heraclitus included) and Sicilian philosophers “appear to me to tell us a myth, as if we were children” (242c8; see also c–e). By calling all those philosophical doctrines muthoi Plato does not claim that they are myths proper, but that they are, or appear to be, non-argumentative. In the Republic Plato is fairly hostile to particular traditional myths (but he claims that there are two kinds of logoi, one true and the other false, and that the muthoi we tell children “are false, on the whole, though they have some truth in them”, 377a; for a discussion of allegory and myth in Plato’s Republic see Lear (2006)). Halliwell (2011) claims that Book X of the Republic “offers not a simple repudiation of the best poets but a complicated counterpoint in which resistance and attraction to their work are intertwined, a counterpoint which (among other things) explores the problem of whether, and in what sense, it might be possible to be a ‘philosophical lover’ of poetry” (244). For an illuminating article on the Republic and the Odyssey see Segal (1978); see also Howland (2006).