Quando gli uomini perivano in silenzio: Elio Aristide e il mito delle origini

This paper intends to highlight the few similarities and the many differences between the myth of the origins contained in Plato’s Protagoras (320c-322d) and the one that Aelius Aristides narrates in the First Platonic Discourse (2. 395-399), in order to show how Aristides’ rewriting of the myth fully reflects the expectations of the society of his time. In his «invention» of the myth of the origins, Aristides in fact recounts how cities came into being for the first time, projecting into the past of the myth those conditions of religious, political and social hierarchies and above all that triumph of rhetoric, with which imperial Greece, or at least a significant part of it, can identify and recognise itself.