Cleinias:  Certainly not.

Athenian:  And will he who does not know what is true be able to distinguish what is good and bad?  My statement is not very clear; but perhaps you will understand me better if I put the matter in another way.

Cleinias:  How?

Athenian:  There are ten thousand likenesses of objects of sight?

Cleinias:  Yes.

Athenian:  And can he who does not know what the exact object is which is imitated, ever know whether the resemblance is truthfully executed?  I mean, for example, whether a statue has the proportions of a body, and the true situation of the parts; what those proportions are, and how the parts fit into one another in due order; also their colours and conformations, or whether this is all confused in the execution:  do you think that any one can know about this, who does not know what the animal is which has been imitated?

Cleinias:  Impossible.

Athenian:  But even if we know that the thing pictured or sculptured is a man, who has received at the hand of the artist all his proper parts and colours and shapes, must we not also know whether the work is beautiful or in any respect deficient in beauty?

Cleinias:  If this were not required, Stranger, we should all of us be judges of beauty.

Athenian:  Very true; and may we not say that in everything imitated, whether in drawing, music, or any other art, he who is to be a competent judge must possess three things;—­he must know, in the first place, of what the imitation is; secondly, he must know that it is true; and thirdly, that it has been well executed in words and melodies and rhythms?

Cleinias:  Certainly.

Athenian:  Then let us not faint in discussing the peculiar difficulty of music.  Music is more celebrated than any other kind of imitation, and therefore requires the greatest care of them all.  For if a man makes a mistake here, he may do himself the greatest injury by welcoming evil dispositions, and the mistake may be very difficult to discern, because the poets are artists very inferior in character to the Muses themselves, who would never fall into the monstrous error of assigning to the words of men the gestures and songs of women; nor after combining the melodies with the gestures of freemen would they add on the rhythms of slaves and men of the baser sort; nor, beginning with the rhythms and gestures of freemen, would they assign to them a melody or words which are of an opposite character; nor would they mix up the voices and sounds of animals and of men and instruments, and every other sort of noise, as if they were all one.  But human poets are fond of introducing this sort of inconsistent mixture, and so make themselves ridiculous in the eyes of those who, as Orpheus says, ‘are ripe for true pleasure.’  The experienced see all this confusion, and yet the poets