The Intelligent Troglodyte’s Guide to Plato’s Republic, 2016a

90 First Accusation: Imitation in Ignorance
See 595a-602b. Socrates’ renewed criticism of the poets falls into two general
accusations, the first being that poets “imitate images of virtue and all the other
things they write about, and have no grasp of the truth.” This phrase “imitate
images” is Socrates’ way of indicating the extent to which poets are removed from
knowledge of the forms. Consider Homer, who attempted in the Iliad and
Odyssey to describe human excellence in action. Did he have a genuine
understanding of wisdom, justice, and the other virtues? Evidently not, given his
depiction of gods, heroes, and men, the best of whom have souls that are
paradigmatically timocratic. Homer never attempts a depiction of philosophical
dialectic, although he does depict, with notable success, quarreling, plotting,
taunting, anguished begging, and lamentation. It is of course conceivable that
Homer never in his life met an aristocratic person. And not being a philosopher
himself, it is likely that, had he met such a person, he would not have understood
her. He presumably had some familiarity with timocratic people. He may have
been one himself, driven to win glory through his verses rather than by the spear.
But he had no real understanding of the forms of the various virtues. This is
Socrates’ point. It is Homer’s experience of particulars – “images” of the forms –
that serves as the basis for his poetic imitations. So these imitations are at best the
imitations of images, a shadow of the truth about human excellence. As Socrates
sees it, poets “take a mirror” to the world of particulars, and produce more or less
accurate representations, not of “the things themselves as they truly are” (the
forms), but of the transient, imperfect, and imperfectly knowable things that make
appearances on the stage of sense experience. Moreover, poets can only represent
certain aspects of the things they imitate. Like someone who is painting a picture
of a bed, and must paint it from a certain angle, under certain lighting conditions,
with the covers arranged in a certain way, and so on, the poet depicting
Agamemnon or Hector or Helen is similarly forced to represent the person’s
character in just some respects. So what the poets offer us are incomplete
representations of imperfect instances of the forms. And yet, if a poet is skillful
and effectively uses “meter, rhythm, and harmony,” then these shadows of the