Avec Les ruses de l'intelligence : la mètis des Grecs (Flammarion, « Nouvelle bibliothèque scientifique », 1975, 316 p.), J.-P. Vernant et M. Detienne offrent au lecteur un livre plein de détours et qui pourtant, à l'image de l'objet qu'il se donne, va droit au but. La métis en effet, c'est l'intelligence rusée, celle précisément qui sait que pour aller droit au but il faut savoir faire des détours, comme le navire qui louvoie devant le vent.

What is Métis? Cunning, shrewdness. J.-P. Vernant and M. Detienne have delimited a new field of inquiry for which the operative models are those of circling, doubling back and interconnecting. In order to reconstruct or construct the configuration of Mètis, it is necessary to traverse the cultural world of the Greeks in its entirety, to enter into a series of processes themselves full of Mètis: techniques of hunting and fishing, myths of kingship, orphic cosmogonies. Métis has been the victim of a twofold silence: the Greeks themselves, or to be more exact, the Greek philosophers held this form of intelligence to be of less value than that which presented itself as veritable knowledge or a systematic search for truth; later, Hellenists, faced with the texts, preferred the reading “the Greek miracle” to “the cunning of Mètis”.