THE TRANSITION OF ANCIENT GREEK SPIRIT FROM MYTHOS TO LOGOS

Abstract

The wondrous ancient Greek mythology framed the life of the Greeks, being a fertile ground for the development of ancient Greek thought and an inexhaustible source of artistic inspiration. It reflected internal concerns and perceptions of the Greeks about life, its laws, its contradictions, about fate and death. It was a special worldview about the phenomena of nature, it included seeds of knowledge, religious and moral beliefs, as well as artistic trends that characterized the dawn of the history of the ancient Greek spirit, at a time when the language was reflecting a still developing stage, in terms of mental apprehending and perception of the world. The development of myths corresponding to the gradual maturation of the Greek spirit, being reflected in the works of epic, lyric poetry and later tragedy, was a complicated process of accumulation and synthesis of elements of the past (facts, ideas, values) that marked the gradual replacement of fictional-invented narrative with evidence-based argumentation with logical reasoning, namely, the transition from Mythos to Logos crystallized by the Ionian philosophers, an intellectual achievement that formed the foundations of European civilization.