Sallust's line is the pivot: not "these things happened long ago" but "these things never happened and always are." The past-tense story is a concession to narration; the myth itself belongs to no tense. When Hillman reads that claim through the Gods — beings who intermarry, intermingle, refuse to hold still for a definition — he is saying something that most therapeutic applications of mythology quietly undo: the myth is not a code waiting to be cracked. It is not allegory. It is not a symbolic disguise for your developmental wound or your relational pattern. The moment you translate it into a solution, you have stopped being inside it and started managing it from outside.

What the myth actually does is stranger than that. It supplies the invisible background — which means it is already operating before the question forms, shaping what counts as a problem worth having, what counts as the kind of darkness worth descending into. The "hidden myth trapped in a problem appealing for release" is Hillman's most precise formulation: not that myth explains the problem, but that something mythic is already imprisoned inside the way you are suffering, and it wants form, not resolution. To imagine it, to let it articulate itself — that is what the myth opens. Whether you can live with what it discloses is another matter entirely.