SOURCE: Skillen, Anthony. “Fiction Year Zero: Plato's Republic.” The British Journal of Aesthetics 32, no. 3 (July 1992): 201-08.

In the following essay, Skillen presents an account of Plato's views on fiction as they are laid out in the Republic.

Then it will be our first business to supervise the production of stories, and choose only those we think suitable, and reject the rest … the worst fault possible, especially if the fiction is an ugly one, is misrepresenting the nature of gods and heroes, like a portrait painter whose portraits bear no resemblance to their originals …

Nor shall any young audience be told that any one who commits horrible crimes, or punches his father unmercifully, is doing anything out of the ordinary but merely what the first and greatest of the gods have done before … God must always be represented as he really is, whether the poet is writing epic, lyric...