Paul Valéry claims : « What a little more precision destroys is a myth ». By this laconic phrase, he in fact says what the myth is when it no longer exists. But Walter F. Otto, who is (with Karl Reinhardt) one of the great figures of the 20th century German philology, aims to immerse us again in the myth realm, from which tragedy and philosophy have sprung, and of which Plato is a sort of deprived heir. After Hölderlin, Schelling, and Nietzsche, Otto is trying to disclose the sense of an essential feature of Ancient Greece which gives us a privileged access to ourselves.