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

21 Censoring Homer
See 376e-377d. They turn first to the sorts of things that should not appear in
stories told to children being educated to serve as responsible guardians of the city.
All but a few of the examples they are going to take up in Books II and III come
from the narrative poems of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey. It is hard to
overestimate the importance of these poems to Greek culture in Socrates’ day.
Schoolchildren commonly committed them to memory, much as schoolchildren
commit the Qur’an to memory nowadays in many of the more traditional
communities in the Islamic world. And just as Jews have always drawn together
as a community to share public readings of Torah, so too Greeks at the time of
Socrates gathered for public recitations of Homer by people called rhapsodes. So
the ease with which characters in Plato cite passages from Homer should come as
no surprise. It would have been perfectly normal for an educated fifth century
Athenian. Imagine then what it might have meant in Socrates’ day to hold the
Homeric poems up to criticism, to suggest that, uncensored, these poems are unfit
for children being raised to be good. It bears remembering that Socrates was
eventually sentenced to death by his fellow citizens on the charges of promoting
unorthodox religious views and corrupting the youth.
Is it ever good to restrict what children are allowed to do? Why or why
not?
Is it ever good to restrict what children are allowed to think and feel?
Would you be in favor of sheltering children from stories describing the
techniques and pleasures of sexual intercourse? From stories of rape? From
stories of racial superiority and inferiority? From stories of mothers
deliberately drowning their children? From stories of gods deliberately
drowning other people’s children, or slaying the firstborn of entire nations?
Why or why not?
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