Republic: Book X Summary

The chief question of the dialog being settled, Socrates refers back to the rules they had proposed at the beginning about poetry. The men had decided that imitative poetry—poetry which speaks from the perspective of a character, and not from the poet—should only be allowed in rare cases, since it is likely to mislead the reader into imitating unvirtuous behavior. Poets and painters are all, in a certain sense, imitators, since they can only represent the appearance of an object which is, itself, only a reflection of a true, underlying reality. Therefore, their competence to speak about issues such as virtue or war are in great question, since they represent these things in a very distant way and it is notable that none of the great poets were ever useful for the purposes of legislating...