ABSTRACT
Plato’s stranger exemplifies the impulse to move beyond myth into logos, anticipating the later author Palaephatus. The stranger wishes earlier philosophers had not mythologized being to their students; he works to define the sophist so as to escape myths about that figure. Yet reading the Sophist alongside Palaephatus illuminates how far myth continues to permeate this work. The sophist’s moneymaking is mythologized into his wildness. The stranger’s closing words about announcing the meaning of the sophist hark back to a dense mythic passage from the Iliad. If philosophy begins by bidding good-bye to myth, it has not left home yet. Keywords: sophist; stranger; myth; Palaephatus; demythologizing.
