Republic

​But if you receive the sweetened Muse in lyric songs or epic verses, pleasure and pain will reign as kings in your city instead of law and that which has always been judged in common to be the best reason. Most true, he said. ”Let these things,” I said, “be our defense, now that we have reminded ourselves concerning poetry, that we were then reasonable in banishing her from the city, she being such as she is; for the argument directed us. But let us tell her, lest she should condemn us for a certain harshness and rusticity, that there is an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry. For indeed, there is that ‘yelping hound baying at her master,’ and ‘great in the empty babbles of fools,’ and the ‘crowd of over-wise heads dominating,’ and the ‘subtle thinkers’ who are after all ‘impoverished,’ and ten thousand other signs of this ancient opposition between them. All the same, let it be said that if the poetry directed toward pleasure and imitation can state some argument showing that she ought to exist in a well-governed city, we would gladly receive her back, since we are conscious of being charmed by her ourselves; but indeed, it is not pious to betray what seems to be the truth. For are you not yourself, my friend, charmed by her, and especially when you contemplate her through Homer? Very much so. Is she not, then, just to return in this way, after having made her defense in song or in some other meter? Quite so. And we would surely also allow her patrons—those who are not poets themselves but lovers of poetry—to speak a prose defense on her behalf, showing that she is not only pleasant but also beneficial to constitutions and human life; and we shall listen benevolently. For we shall surely gain if she is shown to be not only pleasant but also beneficial. How could we not gain? he said.

​But if not, my dear companion, just as those who have once fallen in love with someone, if they judge that their love is not beneficial, hold themselves back, even by force but all the same holding back, so we too, because of the love for such poetry that has been implanted in us by the nurture of our fine constitutions, will be well-disposed to have her appear as excellent and most true; but as long as she is unable to make her defense, we shall listen to her while chanting to ourselves this argument which we speak and this incantation, being careful not to fall back again into that childish love, which is the love of the many. We shall chant, then, that one must not take such poetry seriously, as if it were touching upon truth and were a serious matter, but that the listener must be careful, fearing for the constitution within himself, and must hold to what we have said about poetry. By all means, he said, I agree. For great is the struggle, my dear Glaucon, great, not as it seems, to become a good or a bad man, so that it is not right to neglect justice and the rest of virtue, either under the influence of honor, or money, or any office, or indeed, poetry. I agree with you, he said, from what we have gone through; and I think anyone else whomsoever would too. ”And yet,” I said, “we have not gone through the greatest rewards of virtue and the prizes laid up for her.” You speak of an inconceivable magnitude, he said, if there are other things greater than those already mentioned. For what, I said, could become great in a short time? For indeed, this whole time from childhood to old age would surely be some small thing compared to the whole. Nothing at all, indeed, he said. What then? Do you think that an immortal thing ought to have been serious for the sake of so short a time, and not for the sake of the whole? I certainly think so, he said; but why do you say this? Have you not perceived, I said, that our soul is immortal and never perishes? And he, looking at me and wondering, said: ‘By Zeus, not I! Are you really able to declare this?’ If I am not mistaken, I said. And I think you can too; for it is not at all difficult. It is to me, he said; but I would gladly hear from you this ‘not difficult’ matter. You shall hear it, I said. Only speak, he said. Do you call something good, I said, and something bad? I do. ”Do you, then, think about them in the same way as I do? What sort of way? That which destroys and corrupts everything is the bad, and that which preserves and benefits is the good. Yes, he said.”