From the Beginning to Plato

404 FROM THE BEGINNING TO PLATO
It is this tendency for poetry to speak to the emotions, or to the irrational part
in us, which Plato seems to want to identify as the underlying cause of its faults.
The chief evidence for this is in the Republic. Socrates’ criticisms of poetry—
along with the other parts of ‘music’, in the Greek sense 44 —in Books II–III have
to do with the capacity which it has for instilling beliefs and forming charactertraits,
i.e. those dispositions to behaviour which are referred to under the headings
of the virtues and vices. The discussion is about the early education of future
philosopher-rulers, and begins with the sorts of stories (muthoi, ‘myths’) which
they should be told. The chief purveyors of stories, which are by definition
‘untrue’ or ‘false’ (pseudeis), either because simply fictional or because actually
lying, are the poets, beginning with Homer and Hesiod, and many of their
productions peddle seriously damaging ‘untruths’, particularly about the nature
of the gods: that Kronos castrated his father Ouranos; that Zeus maltreated his
father Kronos; that the gods fight and quarrel with one another. Gods must be
represented to children as what they are, namely good, causes only of well-being
(for our unhappiness, we are ourselves responsible), unchanging, telling only the
truth. Only so will our future rulers grow up with the right attitudes towards gods
and others who require their respect. Poetic descriptions of Hades constitute
another category of untruth: to portray our fate after death as Homer does (and as
Plato himself does, in his myths) is ‘neither true…nor beneficial for those who
are going to be good fighters’. 45 Descriptions of great men, and especially of gods,
lamenting for the dead are also to be outlawed, on the grounds that if young people
fail to laugh at them as they should, they’ll be more likely to break into tears
themselves; excessive laughter is to go too (in Iliad I, Homer has the gods
bursting their sides with laughter as the lame Hephaestus bustles about: that
won’t do). Truthfulness, self-control, endurance—these are the qualities our
poets should, and even occasionally do, encourage.
The last parts of Socrates’ treatment of ‘music’ in this context turn out to offer
a kind of bridge to his further, and crucial, defence of his position in Book X.
The issue is first about how poets should address their audiences: through
narrative, where the author speaks as it were for himself, or through mimēsis,
which here seems to mean something like ‘imaginative recreation’ (the poet, and
then the audience, take on the character being portrayed). The right mode,
Socrates suggests, is combination of the two, but with a much greater proportion
of straightforward narrative, because the only case where mimēsis will be
acceptable is when the character involved is that of a good man, and one
behaving as a good man should, failing in a few minor respects. 46 Finally, a
choice is made about the modes of music which the young should hear, which
turn out, unsurprisingly, to be the simpler ones, which contribute either towards
the inculcation of warlike traits or towards a disciplined, harmonious, evenness of
mind. 47 Both of these sections are essentially about the way in which literature
(‘music’ in the wide sense) reaches into our souls, which is what will form the
main plank of the argument in Book X. The allegation is, and will be, that the
effects of poetry are insidious; that the poets, through the use of music and of