From the Beginning to Plato

416 FROM THE BEGINNING TO PLATO
to the majority of their audience—which Ion understands to refer to his ability to
move them to emotion, while Socrates takes it as referring to his making them
mad.
44 I.e. mousikē, which is broadly that part of human culture which belongs to the
Muses, though usually it covers poetry and music, with or without dance, all three
of which might be combined in performance (as for example in the theatre).
45 386b-c. Given that Plato himself fails to follow the instructions he puts into
Socrates’ mouth, e.g. to ‘throw away all the horrible and frightening names, like
Cocytus and Styx’ (deployed to magnificent effect e.g. in the eschatological myth
of the Phaedo), there must be more than a suspicion that the second criterion is
more important than the first.
46 Or, alternatively, on those few occasions when a bad character happens to be
behaving well. The asceticism of Socrates’ approach to literature is mitigated
slightly at this point (396d-e), when he is allowed to acknowledge that the listener
might adopt an unworthy persona ‘for the sake of amusement’. Occasionally, too,
he hints at a feeling for the ‘poetic’ which is separate from the question about
poetic ‘truth’: so e.g. at 387b, when he is talking about descriptions of Hades
(though the concession ‘not unpoetic’ is immediately taken away by ‘and pleasant
for the many, hoi polloi, to listen to’).
47 These are, interestingly, the two sorts of character that reappear at the end of the
Statesman (cf. n. 32), but as two sorts of character-types, needing to be reconciled.
48 See especially 401c.
49 In 400cff., Socrates broadens out the argument to make it apply to all craftsmen:
they must not make ‘bad character, lack of self-control, meanness or
unshapeliness’ part of their productions, whether these are paintings or buildings or
anything else; we must look for those craftsman who are ‘able by their natural
disposition to track down the nature of the beautiful and the well-formed’ (401a).
Growing up among beautiful things will encourage conformity with the true beauty
of wisdom. All of this hints at, without fully articulating, a kind of theory of
beauty.
50 600e. For the sense in which what the poets recreate are already images, see
following paragraph.
51 They must be insubstantial and false because they are based on ignorance; poets go
only by superficial appearances, Plato suggests—and by offering images of images
(see following paragraph).
52 The word is again eidē, ‘kinds of thing’.
53 It is not that the lower parts are necessarily bad, of course (though the image of the
human soul at ;88b might give one cause for doubt at least about the lowest part,
which is represented as a many-headed monster with some tame heads). Rather it is
that the effect of poetry is so strong that it encourages the development of the
irrational in us, which it is our business to keep in check.
54 596e–597b. The Form of bed is somehow the bed (‘what [a] bed is’, which is
represented as the real thing: 597d), while the carpenter simply makes a bed, which
‘something of the same sort as’ the Form; the painter only ‘makes’ his bed ‘in a
certain way’.
55 Or again (600a), if he knew anything about generalship, he would have fought wars
rather than writing about them. (That is, so Socrates implies, he would have been a
truly expert general—or doctor, or lawgiver—who ‘looks to’ the relevant Forms,