From the Beginning to Plato

PLATO: AESTHETICS AND PSYCHOLOGY 409
No existing poet, then, whether tragic (or ‘serious’) or comic, knows the truth
which his medium is potentially able to convey. This is one of the themes of the
Symposium, in which Socrates meets, among others, two playwrights:
Aristophanes, on the one hand, pre-eminent among writers of comedy, and
Agathon, who has just won a victory with his tragedies (the occasion for the
dinner-party). By the end of the proceedings, most of the company is asleep, but
Socrates is still talking to the two poets, and ‘compelling them to agree that it
belongs to the same man to know how to write comedy and tragedy, and that the
one who has the expertise to write tragedy will also be able to write comedy’
(Symposium 223c–d). He has to ‘compel’ them to agree (by means of argument,
of course) because, by and large, tragedians of the day did not write comedies
nor comic writers tragedies, 72 and Agathon and Aristophanes were certainly
cases in point. What lies behind Socrates’ proposition is that anyone who knows
about one member of a pair of opposites or contraries in a given sphere will know
about the other. In just this way, he argues against Ion (in the Ion) that if he is an
expert on Homer, best of poets, he ought to be equally expert on those who
handle the same things in an inferior way; good and bad poetry must be objects of
the same knowledge. The implication is that neither Agathon nor Aristophanes
really knows his trade, and this has been demonstrated at length in the course of
the dialogue, both through the juxtaposition of their speeches with Socrates’ (every
person at the feast has to make a contribution on the subject of erōs) and, in
Agathon’s case, through the demolition by Socrates of virtually everything he
says. 73
This represents a striking and paradoxical extension of the argument of the Ion
and Republic. Socrates’ claim—and since it seems to be given special emphasis,
it is a claim that Plato evidently wants us to take seriously—is not only that poets
are ignorant about the sorts of matters about which they pretend to teach, but that
they do not even know about poetry. In fact, this second point follows directly
from the first: existing poets are ignorant about poetry just because they are
ignorant about the things they ought to be teaching. Poetry, for Plato, cannot
avoid its teaching role, because it is so powerful; it must therefore get things right
(for there is only one way of being right, certainly in the most important
matters), and if it does not, then it must be at best bowdlerized and at the worst
rooted out and replaced with something more reliable. What that might be is
directly indicated by the Athenian in the Laws, when he describes the account
that he and his partners in the conversation have given of the constitution of
Magnesia as ‘the finest and best tragedy we can write’. The Symposium itself
will be a mixture of tragedy and comedy: comedy, because it puts comic figures
like Aristophanes and Agathon on the stage, 74 and ‘tragic’ to the extent that,
through its portrayal of Socrates (both as a character in the dialogue and as the
object of Alcibiades’ encomium) it is a ‘mimēsis of the finest and best life’,
which the Laws passage declared to be the truest kind of tragedy.
The consequence is that Plato himself is the true poet—not that he himself ever
claims it, since he was not there to claim anything (he is mentioned only twice, with