SOCRATES’ FRIENDSHIP WITH HOMER

Socrates begins with praise of the interlocutors’ earlier exclusion of imitative poetry from their city, an exclusion whose need is, he claims, even more manifest “now that the soul's forms have each been separated out.”Footnote ² The forms to which he refers had come to sight in Book Eight as (a) the honor-, victory-, or war-loving soul; (b) the gain-, money-, or wealth-loving soul; and (c) the intelligence-, truth-, right-opinion loving soul. The last of these was shown to have its true peak in the philosophic life, yet there is to the very end of Book Nine still some (deliberate) blurring of the distinction between that life and a civic life of devoted adherence to “right opinion;” this blurring had permitted Socrates to conclude that the philosopher's life or something like it, rather than a life of politics, is the very life of justice and happiness that Glaucon has been seeking (591c–592b). That conclusion prepares the way for the more comprehensive look at imitative poetry, and hence at its specific effects on the soul, that had been promised in Book Three. The new critique will not forget the need for civic education, but will be made primarily with a view to the philosophic or truth-loving soul.

Before beginning the reexamination Socrates pauses to express his reluctance to renew discussion of the problem of imitative poetry, owing to his “friendship” with Homer. The term “old quarrel between philosophy and poetry,” used later in Book Ten (at 607b4), is much more famous than this expression of friendship, but this overlooked statement warrants all the more our attention. As Aristotle was to say in the Ethics about Plato, so Socrates says here about Homer: He is my friend, but the truth is to be “honored more than a man” (595c1, and cf. Phaedo 91b–c and Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics 1096a15). What is the ground of the friendship that Socrates goes out of his way to highlight here? Homer, says Socrates, “seems to have been the first teacher and leader of all these noble tragic things,” which the interlocutors themselves have been addressing and which are addressed in dialectic, as Socrates had argued in Book Seven. Socrates also says here that he has “shame before [Homer], which has possessed me since childhood” and “prevents me from speaking.” Yet Socrates indeed speaks now: He no longer feels, at least as strongly, that shame that belonged to his youth. Homer is the teacher of the “noble tragic things,” we gather, because he is the teacher of youth, particularly of their sense of shame and honor. Socrates, reared in the powerful Homeric teaching but now liberated from it, presents himself as a new teacher of these “tragic” things. But how far will the new teaching deviate from the old Homeric teachings, and in what ways will it differ?

This question is made the more pointed in light of the unusual reading of this text by Leo Strauss. He argues that, according to Plato, the questions that political philosophy raises about human life, the most compelling answers to those questions, and the acceptance or rejection of those answers by thoughtful human beings can already be found in the works of poets like Homer; only the enlisting of the natural experience of those questions and answers in the service of the grounding activity of philosophy or science is peculiarly Socratic (Strauss Reference Strauss and Pangle1989, 171–83; cf. the truly remarkable reading of Halliwell Reference Halliwell, Destrée and Herrmann2011, 241, who notes the “subtle dialectical movements of Plato's text” in Book Ten).

IMITATION AND DIVINELY MADE IDEAS

After an exchange of teasing jokes—an exchange that indicates how much a sense of shame affects Glaucon in the presence of Socrates (595c–596a)— Socrates begins to examine what poetry or, more precisely, imitation in general is. The answer will be that imitation is a production of appearances that look like but (as Glaucon insists) are not the original or, as Socrates says, in a sense are in being and in a sense are not (596d).Footnote ³ The examination's conclusion turns on a discussion of the ideas, and Socrates’ first example is couches and tables: There are many of them, but only one idea of each. The craftsman looks to an “idea” to make the couches or chairs that “we use.” He does not and could not “fabricate the idea” himself, Socrates asserts, and Glaucon agrees (596b). By this account an idea is that to which a craftsman looks when fabricating an imitation of what is.

Socrates then speaks of a craftsman who fabricates not only “all implements” but also “everything that grows naturally from the earth, and who produces all animals—the others and himself too—and, in addition to that, produces earth and heaven and gods and everything in heaven and everything in Hades under the earth” (596c). One might initially take Socrates to be referring here to some supreme god who makes all things. But what he turns out to be describing is the poet, who “in a certain way” is such an extraordinary craftsman, a “maker of all these things,” and in a certain way is not. For even Glaucon could “in a certain way” make “all these things”: He need but take a mirror and “carry it around everywhere” (596d). Then, Socrates tells him, you could “make the sun and things in the heaven; quickly, the earth; and quickly, yourself and the other animals and implements and plants and everything else that was just now mentioned.”

This famous image is often said to present poetry as “a mirror of nature” or to present the mind as a mirror that reflects reality (Rorty Reference Rorty1979, 12). Yet this reading of the passage overlooks something crucial: Socrates does not here finish repeating the earlier list of things reflected in the mirror; the phrase “and the other things we mentioned” takes the place of “gods” and “everything in Hades” mentioned in the original list (at 596c). And these omitted items cannot be said to be in nature (Benardete Reference Benardete1989, 216), although they certainly are in the work of Homer. How one holds a mirror to gods or to the place called Hades is difficult to say; certainly their being differs from that of what is by “nature.” In any event, the claim being raised is not simply that poetry imitates or is a “mirror of nature,” because the poetry Socrates has in mind includes presentation of the gods and of the afterlife, and the relation of these two to any possible “nature”—the object of philosophers’ inquiries—is highly problematic. (To be sure, the confusion of the two is not uncommon in our age. Rorty, for example, argues that the claim that the world. . .has an intrinsic nature—one which the physicist or the poet may have glimpsed—is a remnant of the idea that the world is a divine creation [Reference Rorty1991, 21]. Shakespeare's Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream [5.1. 13–18] stands much closer to the Socratic position.)

Glaucon denies that what is produced by a mirror is what is; it rather is a mere appearance of something that is (596e). Socrates agrees, arguing that the painter is an example of someone who presents only an appearance of what is. He then claims, however, that the maker of a couch is also not making that being, but something that is only like that being, because the couch maker looks to the idea of a couch, which is the being of the couch, and imitates it. And from where came that idea of the couch, the one that is “in nature,” as Socrates says? A god made it, says Socrates (597b). The painter therefore, when painting a couch, is imitating an imitation of an idea that is in nature and made by a god. His painting is at three removes from what is.

To grasp Socrates’ intention in this opening argument concerning imitation, we must first see that the argument is very odd. (Murray notes that its oddness was remarked on in antiquity. For a helpful discussion of its odd features other than those that I discuss, see Rosen [Reference Rosen and Rosen2005] and Annas [Reference Annas1981, 227–32].) One of its oddities is that it includes the suggestion that couches exist “in nature.” As Aristotle says—quoting the poet Antiphon to illustrate the difference between what is by art and what is by nature—plant a bed in the ground and it will not grow a bed, though it may grow a tree out of the wood from which it is made (Aristotle, Physics 193a–b; cf. Plato, Laws 888e and f and Heidegger [1954] Reference Heidegger and Lovitt1977, 5). In fact, if we look ahead for a moment (to 601d6), we find Socrates using the very dichotomy of which Aristotle later speaks: “the use for which each was made, or grew naturally.” As this suggests, what is by nature is not “made” (by artful motions), but instead has within it a principle of motion, of growth and decay (see also 401a and e).

One might object, however, that in speaking of a couch that is by or in nature, Socrates means not the kind of couch we can touch and sit on, but the idea of the couch. Yet this only amplifies the problem, because in making this claim Socrates presents a god as the artistic maker or creator of what is by nature (597c); that is, of the ideas (Ferrari Reference Ferrari and Kennedy1989, 126). Socrates even indicates in two ways the problem of doing so. First, he soon speaks of the god as naturally “engendering” the idea of couch (i.e., causing it to be “begotten,” as he puts it [597d]), which is closer to the root word of nature, phuo, to be born, and is quite different from being “made” by art. That is a quiet reminder of how very peculiar it is that the ideas are being presented as something “made.”

The second way Socrates indicates the peculiarity of his claim here (at 597c) is by raising the question of whether the god who “begot” this idea of couch was “compelled” to make only one or could choose to make two. Yet he immediately explains that there really cannot be more than one idea of a thing by nature (cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics 1070a18) because if the god should make two things, then the form that they would both possess—that form, and not the two ideas of couches the god made—would be the “couch that is.” Now although Socrates goes on to say that the god, knowing this and having his unique status as couch maker threatened by it—by the existence of a being that he did not make—made only one so that what he made would be the idea, what is actually implied is that the god does not make the form at all. The form is instead something perceived (by a mind) in existing beings—perceived, we might add, all the better by having two examples rather than one, by being able to compare and contrast it with other things. The form is what a perceiving mind grasps must of necessity be there for a thing to be what it is; it is what defines the thing as a this rather than a that. It is present and perceptible in a particular being as what that being is, or the being of the thing (to on, 597a; compare Aristotle, Categories 2a11–3b23, 2a34–b6). It could also be said to be the class or kind to which a thing belongs by nature. And if it is there by nature—that is, of necessity— then no god can change it. Here, then, in the midst of this amusing presentation of the ideas as made by a god and of their role in art, we get, as a corrective, an indication of what the ideas actually would be (contrast Rosen Reference Rosen and Rosen2005). And unlike the underlying, unknown causes that gave rise to the particular beings in question, they would not be eternal, but would exist only so long as there are particular examples of what they are, as perceived by a human mind. Glaucon's claim here that the god has made both the idea of the couch and “everything else” thus represents the polar opposite of what Socrates is suggesting: The erotic and spirited Glaucon (see 372c–e, 468b–c, 474d, 548c–e) thinks that what is, far from being by necessity and being what it is by necessity, is made (and can of course be unmade). Unbinding the gods from necessity, he adopts the theological position.

To return to Socrates’ argument: As the painter of a couch is an imitator of the couch made by the craftsman, which itself is an imitation of the idea of the couch made by the god, so too is the poet, or the “maker of tragedy,” an imitator (597e) at three removes from what is. Furthermore, the painter imitates only the perspectival looks of a thing—its looks from this or that angle—and aims to present its looks rather than its being, so his work is quite far removed from the truth— only a deceptive phantom of the truth, as Socrates now calls it (Nichols Reference Nichols1987, 139–40). But Socrates does not move to state that so too is the poet's work, like the painter’s, perspectivally removed from the truth of what is—at least not explicitly. Instead he speaks of one who claims to have met a man with knowledge of “crafts and everything else that several men know,” and know precisely, calling the one who makes this claim an “innocent,” deceived by a “wizard,” and unable to put knowledge to the test. Socrates would seem to have in mind here someone like Ion the rhapsode. Only after speaking of such a deceived innocent does Socrates turn to poetry or rather to “tragedy and its leader, Homer” (598d). The wizardry of the tragic poet would seem to consist of presenting a limited and thus deceptive perspective on human life that is accepted as authoritative “knowledge” by his (more innocent) admirers. As we have argued and as the sequel bears out, that perspective is the theological perspective.

Those who say of poets like Homer that they are “knowers of all the arts” also say (second) that the poets are knowers “of all things human that have to do with virtue and vice” and also say (third) that they are knowers of “the divine things, too” (598e1–3). Socrates now asks whether those who make these claims about the poets have “encountered these imitators and been deceived” (as by a perspectival painter) or whether there is not “something to what they say” (598e–599a). Perhaps the “good poets,” as Socrates says, are indeed actually knowers of these things, human and divine. Perhaps the theological perspective that informs the understanding of these admirers of Homer is the true perspective. Socrates certainly is open to this possibility. But how to know if the poets are indeed knowers in this grave matter?

THE TESTS OF HOMER’S KNOWLEDGE OF THE ARTS, VIRTUES, AND DIVINE THINGS

To find out, Socrates first conducts or pretends to conduct a series of tests designed to establish whether Homer is a knower. The tests are very dubious. The first claim Socrates makes is that, if one could make both a thing to be imitated and the imitation or “the phantom” of it, one would not be serious about crafting the phantom but would make the thing itself. That is, one would somehow “make” a prudent king, or a brave soldier, or a swineherd, instead of being a poet who makes mere phantoms of them. But Socrates knows that Homer is held to be the one who “educated Hellas” (606e), a far greater accomplishment than to be the “maker” (in any human sense) of any one of these.

Socrates’ second test, which seems to address the poet's alleged knowledge of virtues and vices, is similarly less than straightforward: “[I]f he were in truth a knower of these things that he also imitates, he would be far more serious about the deeds than the imitations and would try to leave many noble deeds behind as memorials of himself and would be more eager to be the one who is praised rather than the one who praises” (599b). This judgment, which—by speaking of the attempt to “leave behind. . .memorials”—begins to raise the issue of the right disposition toward death, is made on the assumption that deeds are more important than speeches; it judges the poet according to the (limited) understanding of the doer of noble deeds. Socrates does not share this assumption (549a). In fact, in its claim about leaving behind (after death) memorials of praise for oneself through accomplishing noble deeds, the judgment rises no higher than the understanding of Homer's own Sarpedon—who links noble deeds to some awareness of his mortality and the wish to “leave behind” some sung praise of himself as a memorial, but whose contentment with such praise over and against genuine immortality bespeaks a failure to grasp the finality of death in the face of eternity (Iliad 12.322–28; cf. 7.103–05; 22.305). A Sarpedon's grasp certainly does not ascend to the understanding of someone as serious in his reflections on death as Achilles—who seeks, as Socrates says elsewhere, an “immortal” remembering of his virtue—and hence not to that of Homer himself (see Burns Reference Burns, Knippenberg and Lawler1996 n17 and Ahrensdorf Reference Ahrensdorf and Burns2010). The argument thus reminds us of Pericles’ boastful claim in his funeral oration that “we need no Homer to sing our praises” (Thucydides 2.41.4)—as if a Homer were merely someone who sings the praises of doers of noble deeds, a portable gravestone (see Iliad 7.84–91 with 23.326–34). Serious readers of the Iliad—among whom, as we know from Books Two and Three of the Republic, we can count Socrates—know that Homer is someone who reflects deeply on death, on the life of noble deeds, and on what constitutes a worthwhile life, as indeed we see Homer having Achilles reflect in Book Nine, the pivotal book of the Iliad. (On this important reflection of Achilles, see Ahrensdorf Reference Ahrensdorf and Burns2010, 10–15; Bolotin Reference Bolotin1989, 46–48; Bruell Reference Bruell1999, 101–2; Burns Reference Burns, Knippenberg and Lawler1996; Lutz Reference Lutz2006, 114–16; Rabieh Reference Rabieh2006, 118–19; Ruderman Reference Ruderman, Palmer and Pangle1995, 40–41). The argument thus far has indicated what is at issue in this examination—including a clear knowledge of mortality—while merely pretending to make manifest the inadequacy of Homer's knowledge.

By moving now to a third test, Socrates implicitly admits that the tests he has thus far presented have not settled the matter of Homer's knowledge. About arts such as Asclepian medicine, he declares, we will not inquire whether Homer knows them better than the craftsmen. (Socrates had himself chosen for the city in speech the Asclepian medicine described by Homer over Herodicean medicine: 403c–410a, esp. 404b—406c.) Instead we will ask about “the greatest and noblest things of which Homer attempts to speak—about wars and commands of armies and governances of cities, and about the education of a human being.” The last two items on this new list would come under Homer's understanding of “virtue and vice” in the initial list (at 598e). The first two items—wars and command of armies—would come under arts. But then “the divine things” mentioned in the initial list appear to be excluded from the new list—though they of course appear in Homer's descriptions of these “greatest and noblest things.” However, Socrates presents no examination of any of Homer's teachings about any of these items, offering not so much as a single quotation, in contrast to his treatment of Homer in Books Two and Three. He instead gives a series of what amount to accusations of Homer's lack of a founding influence on cities or private ways of life.

The first accusation is that no city claims Homer as its foundational, beneficent legislator, as Sparta for example claims Lycurgus, nor is any “war in Homer's time remembered that was well fought with his ruling or advice,” nor are there any “inventions and devices for the arts” that would be “appropriate to the deeds of a wise man” (599d–600a). Second, had Homer at least been a private educator, he would have followers named after him, as Pythagoreans follow Pythagoras. Yet there are no Homerians; in fact, Glaucon adds, Homer is said to have been neglected in his own time. Finally, although Protagoras or Prodicus persuaded the men of their time that they could govern neither their home nor their city without an education from Protagoras or Prodicus himself, and although their followers love and esteem them, the men of Homer's time, far from clinging to him or trying to persuade him to stay with them at home, let Homer and Hesiod wander about as mere rhapsodes (600a–e)—not providing them with a home or friendly following but rejecting them because they made phantoms of virtue rather than true virtue.

These arguments, which (until the reference to Hesiod at 600d5) are strictly about Homer, appear to be as tongue in cheek as the earlier ones. The great war of which Homer sings takes its course not by the art of generalship but by the virtues of the participants and by the gods. And even should one confuse a wise man with a teacher of inventions, the argument would not fit the case of Homer, who in both of his epics deliberately sings of deeds that occurred in the ancient past. That is one reason Homer claims to need the divine Muse to tell him what happened; the deeds of the Trojan War and any “devices” of which he sings are deliberately archaic (see, e.g., Iliad 2.474–94, 580; cf. Protagoras 326a1–2). As Socrates is well aware, reliance on progress in artful inventions represents in fact an understanding of and disposition toward first things that tends away from the belief in divine law that Homer finds among his listeners and artfully fosters for Hellas (see Burns Reference Burns and Burns2010; Aristotle, Politics 2.8, 1268b23–1269a27).

Second, if the poets are, as Socrates has suggested in the cave metaphor, responsible for the “phantoms” and shadows on the wall of the cave (eidola: 520c with 514b–515c), then Homer is the educator of many a Lycurgus, whose laws would reflect Homer's teachings. (Contrast Euben Reference Euben1990, 256. Consider also the correspondingly high place Diotima accords the poets relative to legislators Lycurgus and Solon at Symposium 209d–e. The modern equivalent of Socrates’ argument would be to claim that Montesquieu had no influence on the American founding because he laid down no founding laws, as did Madison.) Homer is not a political founder but—as Socrates well knows—something much bigger: the chief puppeteer of all of Hellas. Together with Hesiod (which perhaps explains Socrates’ reference to Hesiod here) Homer is said by Herodotus to have given the Greeks their understanding of the divine (Inquiries 2.53). He founded no way of life for a mere private group of eponymous followers, as did Protagoras, but—as Thucydides, who provides a similarly deadpan criticism of Homer, shows (at 1.2.1–1.3.3)—gave the whole of Hellas its name: the followers of Achilles. Only they are called “Hellenes” in the Iliad, and after the Iliad comes to be known, all its hearers wish to be known as “Hellenes,” as was Achilles. So even should we find the private success of Protagoras and Prodicus to be reliable indexes of genuine knowledge—Ferrari (Reference Ferrari and Kennedy1989, 130–31) finds the references to Prodicus and Protagoras “ironic”—if they can now provide a leisured moral education for a few wealthy young men, they can do so only thanks to Homer's grand civilizational success. And if the men of Homer's day neglected Homer, as Glaucon claims, that is likely because Homer's poems had yet to begin having their effect. (Consider in this regard Socrates’ statement, at 607e, that the “inborn love of such poetry” as Homer's “we owe to our rearing in these fine regimes.”) What Socrates’ somewhat outrageous proofs have pointed us to is Homer's great, foundational influence rather than his lack of knowledge. He has also introduced the question of the awareness of death and the proper response to it as a key to determining the depth of the poet's knowledge.

There is one final reason to consider this pointer and this introduction, rather than the surface argument, to be the serious parts of Socrates’ arguments. Socrates’ claim that Homer was neglected during his lifetime because he made phantoms of virtue rather than true virtue assumes that Homer's contemporaries knew what true virtue is and rejected Homer for not teaching it. In the sequel Socrates argues that what wins people over to poets like Homer is never an appeal to virtue, but rather pleasant appeals to certain desires against virtue. That is, Socrates presents the people as bad judges of what they ought to be listening to. The poet's appeal, Socrates now explains, is not to virtue but to something else; he appears to speak well to those who are charmed by “meter, rhythm, and harmony,” regardless of subject matter. These three deployments of the poet are charming “by nature” (601a–b), and making an appeal to Glaucon's own experiences with love poetry, Socrates ties the appeal of these poetic adornments to erotic love, especially of youth (601b; cf. 368a).

This argument moves, to repeat, in an opposite direction from those we have just heard concerning Homer's failure to achieve a following in his own day. It suggests that only an unskilled poet, rather than one with an erroneous teaching about virtue, would fail to have followers. And no one, least of all Socrates, claims that Homer is an unskilled poet (see 607a1–2; Levin Reference Levin2001, 148–49). That is, the argument attempts to explain why Homer does indeed now have so large a following of admirers. It even begins to indicate knowledge, on the part of good poets, of what is needed to move human beings most deeply. Socrates has thus far piqued our interest concerning Homer's extraordinary influence on the Hellenes’ devotion to noble lives of virtue and to divine justice—on Hellenes who are, Socrates has suggested, moved by erotic longing in the face of death. To show us whether Homer is a knower, however, he will have to give at least some indication of what a possessor of genuine virtue would know and guide his life by, and the relation of that knowledge to the awareness of mortality and the erotic longing to which that awareness gives rise.

THE SECOND ACCOUNT OF IMITATION AND OF THE POETS’ SUCCESS

Socrates now gives a quite different account of who is the true knower in the imitative arts (Annas Reference Annas, Moravcsik and Temko1982, 11–13). As we saw earlier in Book Ten's initial account of the ideas and imitation, Socrates had presented a triad of craftsmen: god, craftsman, painter. The god made the idea of the couch (the true couch), the craftsman made the couch (a phantom of the idea), the painter made an image of the couch (an image of a phantom). Now (starting at 601b–c) Socrates presents a new triad: user, craftsman, painter. In this second account of what it means to understand what is, the god has been replaced by the user, and so (as noted earlier) the dichotomy between what is made by art and what grows naturally is restored (at 601d). The true knower is now said to be the user, who is not a maker but instead is someone who can judge what is made by its goodness, or its appropriateness to the end at hand, and—in the case of things musical, such as flute playing—who can judge what is most productive of beautiful or noble things. The maker of implements is compelled to “listen to the man who knows,” the user (601e). The poet, Socrates now alleges, does not take his bearings by listening to the user, the knower; the poet instead takes his bearings by “what looks noble to the many, who don't know anything” (602b). The poet by this account is a mere imitator of the reigning moral opinions of his time, as they are held by the many.

But if we turn momentarily away from Socrates’ claim here and to the words of Homer, what we find the poet pretending, at least, to listen to is not the voices of his time, but the voice of the divine Muse. How then might these two things—what looks noble to the many and what the Muses sing—be related? What is it about most human beings, in other words, that causes the poets’ adorned accounts of the divine to be so much more appealing than a true account? Socrates—stepping forward now as a knower—argues that the poets are able to appeal as they do to human beings owing to a “disturbance (tarakê) in the soul,” a “suffering (pathema) of our nature” (602c–d). We humans have, he argues, a vulnerability, exploited by the poet, to being misled by something, in the same way that our vision is misled by the vision of a stick in water. This vulnerability or disturbance causes something to seem bigger or smaller, and so on; that is, to be magnified (to use Thucydides’ word—1.10.3, 1.21.1). The calculating part of the soul counteracts the confusion by careful measurements, but the poets exploit the confused, magnified seeing.

But then what is the “part of the soul” to which Socrates here refers, which is “opining contrary to” (603a) the calculating part—misleading it—when it listens to poetry? Although Socrates says that this part is a low or ordinary thing and not the best (that is, the calculative) part, he then admits that it is a “part of thought” (dianoia—603b). This part prevents a human—when he hears the poet's imitation of human deeds and speeches—from being of one mind (homonoetikos—603c). It causes one to do battle with oneself, as Socrates reminds Glaucon they had previously shown to be possible (at 435d–440e). Here, however, it seems that the mind, nous, is at odds with itself, rather than with an allegedly separate “part” called desire or spiritedness.Footnote ⁴ In any event, Socrates claims that he and Glaucon had left out something in their earlier account of the soul doing battle with itself that they must now address—thereby signaling that we will now finally receive the fuller, more adequate account of poetry that we had not received in the earlier critique; we will even receive a fuller account of the soul.

THE TRUTH ABOUT LAMENTATION AND VIRTUE

What, then, is the new disclosure (at 603d9–604a9)? It has to do with lamentation. It is best discerned if we first recall the earlier discussion of poetry, in Book Three (387d1–e10). There Socrates had argued that being dead is not a terrible thing, so a comrade's death is not terrible—not a cause of lamentation—to the decent man. Moreover, the decent man is self-sufficient, and so even the death of a son is least terrible to him; he is in no need, for his happiness, of his family members, and so has little sorrow over their loss. He accordingly laments the least and bears it most gently when struck by such misfortunes. This, we may say, is the public or spirited view, or the Spartan view—it would have mothers telling their sons to come back from war either with their shields or on them. To support it, the poet must not present great men lamenting, Socrates had implied, lest he lead human beings to follow weeping heroes’ examples and hence act contrary to the good of the city or to a noble self-sufficiency. Their city's poetry would therefore, Socrates had admitted, be “more austere and less pleasing” than, say, Homeric poetry. The poet must also abstain from the levity that comes from comedy (394d–398b).

This early presentation is more or less repeated here in Book Ten (at 603d–e). But now Socrates makes explicit his doubts as to whether the decent or virtuous person, who has been raised under the laws of the fair city in speech, is in truth self-sufficient, and hence not grieved at all by a son's or friend's loss, or whether that is “impossible,” so that this decent or virtuous man will only “somehow be sensible in the face of pain.” Glaucon now admits that the latter is closer to the truth—that the presentation in Book Three contained a significant magnification (603e): The truth is that death is something terrible (Levy Reference Levy2013, 30). And just how a decent man will be “sensible in the face of pain” is also now revised by Socrates. What keeps such a one from grieving, he now claims, is “argument and law.” In a sense the role played by the law is clear: The law says that it is shameful for a man to cry— that is, to display his own personal loss or neediness, to be anything but devoted to the city. The good citizen therefore fights the pain in public, when seen by his peers, and will give in to the desire to cry only when alone.

But what about the role played by argument (logos)? There is, we now learn, more than one reason that logos might give for following the law's injunction and fighting one's grief (604b). “The law,” Socrates says as he begins to relate these reasons, “presumably says. . .” He must say “presumably” because in truth the law does not “say” this. The law as law simply says that “it is shameful to cry” or “keep a stiff upper lip.” Socrates gives four possible reasons for why the law would forbid tears: first, the good and bad in difficult experiences are not clear; second, taking it hard gets one nowhere; third, none of the human things are worthy of great seriousness; and fourth, being in pain is an impediment to deliberation about what has happened and how best to cure it and set it aright. In the first, second, and fourth arguments, there is a direct appeal to consideration of what is beneficial to oneself and one's nearest and dearest, rather than to what is just or noble, as a means to bucking up. This, we could say, describes what could direct the mind, outside of the public scrutiny and shame of fellow citizens: It tends in the direction of what is beneficial to oneself. The third argument offers, however, a different kind of statement. Far more theoretical, it is equally or still more in need of being kept from public scrutiny, for it is at odds with the dignity and majesty of any law or the public life that law makes possible. It is of the same type as the statement made by the Athenian Stranger to the interlocutors in the Laws, when he says (at 803c and following) that we are the playthings or puppets of the gods—and thereby incurs Megillus’ angry reply that he is belittling the human things.Footnote ⁵

This third argument enables us to understand what Socrates has been driving at when speaking of the part of the soul that in most of us is confused and that magnifies something. It implies that in our tears our minds are overtaken by a longing to recover and hold fast to an understanding of the world in which our lives are indeed of great significance, our virtue noticed, our worthiness upheld, by divine beings. The poets, appealing to this longing, feed it, rather than presenting the (very difficult or painful) truth that our mind perceives. It is here, I think, that we get the true reason for Socrates’ hilarious critique of poetry. Poetry can make those who feed their souls with it so soft as to be incapable of accepting what is and so of taking artful provision for their lives (cf. 606b). These would include human beings whose minds are, Socrates implies, otherwise capable of accepting, through private instruction, the truth in question.

THE PRUDENT AND QUIET CHARACTER

This reading is confirmed by the sequel. Socrates now claims that the “prudent and quiet character,” as opposed to the irritable one, is not easily imitated by a poet nor, when imitated, easily understood by a festive assembly. (This is a character who does not cry out, but knows that human things are not worthy of great seriousness; contrast Murray Reference Murray1997, 229.) Now although or because this statement appears to offer yet another criticism of the poets’ appeals to passions that please the many, two aspects of it tending in the opposite direction require our attention. First, Socrates is saying that a poet is indeed capable of the difficult task of imitating the prudent and quiet character. Socrates even states that such imitation happens. When it happens, the prudent and quiet character is not easily understood by “the many” (605a; consider also 398a, where Socrates speaks of “wisdom” as the cause of the poet's ability to “imitate all things.” Homer is called “divinest and wisest of poets” at Alcibiades II, 147c6–7.) Such a character may of course be understood by a few in the audience. In fact he would have to be, for Socrates to be making this argument about him. We must conclude that the poet's need to obtain a reputation among the many, and to guide them as best they can be guided, compels (cf. 493d) him most often to present the angry or lamenting man rather than the one with a prudent and quiet character—whom (to repeat) the poet indeed understands and may even present, though at the risk of having most of his audience misunderstand him.

Having made this crucial disclosure of the poet's knowledge, Socrates tells Glaucon that we shall “at last be justified in not admitting [the poet] into the city that is going to be under good laws,” because the poet “awakens this part of the soul” and “nourishes it” and thereby “destroys the calculating part.” Socrates concludes that, as in the city, so in the soul one must prevent the imitative poet from gratifying the “foolish part” and producing a bad regime there. Socrates had spoken of minding “the city within” oneself at the end of Book Nine, when Glaucon had finally grasped that Socrates’ teaching about the best life would move one away from political life. He makes clear here that it is as the guide of the private life of the individual that Homer has just been examined and found wanting. But we also see that the poet of whom we have just now gained a glimpse is himself aware of the danger to the soul of which Socrates speaks. Such a poet may even be capable of leading his best readers to the serene disposition to which Socrates has quietly drawn our attention, the disposition of the quiet man—such as that of Achilles in Book Nine of the Iliad—who, admitting that “we all die,” sees that the human things are not worthy of great seriousness or who overcomes the common human mistake, born of erotic longing, of endowing his life, and its sufferings, with greater meaning than it has in itself. Homer's failure to make sufficient provision for the cultivation of such quiet types was not a result of his lack of knowledge of their existence or of the central insight that guided their lives.

Let me spell this out by first stepping back and then observing what happens in the sequel. Socrates has claimed that tears prevent one from practicing deliberation; that is, they prevent the soul's turning to “curing and setting aright what has fallen and is sick, doing away with lament by medicine” (604d). Reminiscing about suffering and complaining are irrational and a friend of cowardice. The best advice is “get over it” or “move on.” This advice may be sound in cases of correctible misfortune. But what about those things for which there is simply no cure, no remedy, such as the loss of a son or of a friend? Or one's own death? Surely Socrates has not forgotten these. And as he knows, some number of these losses must affect even the life of the quiet, serene man who faces his death instead of exaggerating his significance.

This consideration may help explain the otherwise surprising turn that the conversation now takes (starting at 605c). For now Socrates admits, and prompts Glaucon to admit, that “even the best of us” (and so not only “the many,” as Socrates has hitherto pretended) enjoy the lamentations of the heroes and give ourselves over to them. As Socrates admits now that the charms of Homeric poetry tempt even his mind from maintaining a firm grasp of or right disposition toward the human condition, we see the distance between him and Homer decrease still more. For Socrates’ admission goes together with the new consideration or information about the virtuous or decent being not self-sufficient but in fact embattled in their minds by the wish to make a noble public display of stoicism and the corresponding need for a private, shameful shedding of tears over their loss: Admitting to the temptation—perhaps on the basis of what he did indeed experience in his youth—Socrates himself here breaks the shame barrier, which allows Glaucon to do so also, publicly declaring that he himself has given in to the desire to shed tears. But once Socrates has done so, he asks Glaucon how we can, on one hand, praise the poet who puts “us” in this tearful state and, on the other, take pride in bearing up against personal sorrow and keeping quiet in a manly fashion. How can we enjoy and praise a tearful man whom we would blush to condescend to resemble (605c–e)?

Glaucon, with an oath by Zeus, says that it does seem unreasonable. But Socrates disagrees. He now explains very clearly how it is reasonable, on the basis of what we have just seen concerning the lack of self-sufficiency in the soul of the decent or virtuous, as well as the resulting disharmony in the soul. He tells Glaucon that he will see its reasonableness

What Socrates now calls the “mournful part” of the soul, held down by force of reason or (alternatively) by shame and habituation, is something that “by nature” hungers for tears. The poets, knowing what the soul is “by nature,” provide it satisfaction when “what is by nature best in us” (the calculating part, or reason) relaxes its watch on this part. The toughest, most reliable, most stiff-upper-lip soldier may well weep when hearing a serious drama about war. How or why is the poet able to induce this reaction? What permits the poet to breach our defenses, to cause reason to relax its scrutiny of this “mournful part”? The poet, Socrates here explains, presents or makes public the laments of a man who (like the listeners themselves) claims to be good, moving us to a publicly acceptable, reputable, or nonshameful sentiment: We have praise and pity for this apparently good man. The poet thereby allows us to give this “mournful part” that for which it has long hungered: tears. That is to say, one cries for the hero because one feels and has long felt the same deep sorrow in one's own soul. Pitying the hero, one pities oneself, as one has (contrary to law or shame) in truth long hankered to do.

The official public teaching of the Republic's city in speech, and to some extent of all premodern republican political life, is that virtue is sufficient for happiness; the poet, knowing the truth, knows that there is a deep sadness in the soul of the virtuous that no habituation can fully overcome, to which the poet can and does appeal (contrast Ferroli Reference Ferrari and Kennedy1989, 140.) Far from being at three removes from the truth or the mere spokesman for the morality of his time, the poet knows the publicly hidden or shameful truth in this matter, the truth covered up by any serious morality. The poet discloses in public the truth that is by shame or law kept private (contrast Levin Reference Levin2001, 149–50).

This is the nature of poetry, and Socrates now makes clear that he means not only tragic but also comic poetry: He claims that the “same argument” made about the “sorrowing part” applies to what he now calls the “laughing part” (606c). He argues that, just as shame prevents one from weeping in public, so it prevents one from making jokes in public, but “you enjoy very much hearing in comic imitation or in private” these very things. Logos holds down what in you wishes to make jokes—what wishes to dispel the pretense of dignified life—but it is logos moved by shame, or fear of a reputation for buffoonery or a lack of gravitas. So Socrates will in a moment refer to “law and that logos which in each instance is best in the opinion of the community” (607a6, emphasis added). The argument holding down your laughter is not necessarily a reasoning about the truth, any more than was argument holding down your tears.

Yet the argument about “the laughing part” is not, after all, quite “the same” as the argument about “the mourning part.” If it were, Socrates would conclude it by saying that the laughing part, craving laughter, is “given satisfaction and enjoyment from the [comic] poets.” Instead, he concludes that the laughing part, formerly held down, is released and “made youthful,” so that, carried away, “you become a comic poet” (emphasis added): The argument switches from one who laughs to one who makes others laugh. Socrates may be pointing thereby to the more active and shameless nature of the laughing part. But perhaps he also means that, just as one who jokes seeks to move an audience to laughter, so does one who weeps seek to move an audience—perhaps above all a divine one—to pity, and that the hope to do so diminishes the painful awareness behind the tears, providing a respite from it, even as the painful awareness serves to increase the pleasure afforded by hoping against it, so long as it is possible to hope (cf. Bartlett Reference Bartlett2008, 148; Thucydides 7.75.4). In any event, statements made by the poets, both comic and tragic, contain appeals to what is true over and against what the law declares to be shameful or noble to hold true.

Socrates has suggested that one actually finds in the genuine knower, who does not overestimate the human things, the kind of equanimity and quiet and even serenity that the law (boastfully) claims belongs to those who are directed by shame. If the knower laments or laughs, he does so rarely, in a relaxation of his reason. Yet the best poets are, as we have seen, as aware of such knowers as they are of the truth about the pains of the virtuous or the truth hidden by shame. And the poets would of course have to be themselves such quiet, prudent knowers. For all of their alleged rarity, the virtuous guardians of Books Three and Four are much more common than are the good poet and the philosopher, the two knowers.

In fact, the new account of the decent or virtuous as not self-sufficient but instead as pained by loss, as privately weeping, as fighting 10,000 desires (603d), and as ever hungering for tears and laughter, helps explain a curious part of the myth of Er, which takes up the second half of Book Ten. According to Socrates, the virtuously habituated man, when presented with a choice of possible lives to lead, chooses the life of the greatest tyranny, of Eros incarnate, for his second life: “He was one of those who had come from heaven, having lived in an orderly regime in his former life, participating in virtue by habit, without philosophy” (619c–d). He is speaking of the virtuous man of Books Three and Four. Only the philosopher, it seems—the one who knows that the human things are not worthy of great seriousness—has the related capacity to accept with equanimity the sorrowful truth about that for which there is no remedy, death (see again 585b–c with 584c and 608c5–8; Bolotin Reference Bolotin1987). It is noteworthy that this new myth builds on or takes for granted full acquaintance with the poetry of Homer (see, e.g., 620c).

POETRY’S SUPPORT FOR LAW

But if the capacity to accept this disturbing truth is so rare, then the law wisely attempts to keep that truth at bay. The criticism of the poets would seem then to come down to their failing to see the wisdom of the law in so doing. But do the poets even fail here? In arguing earlier that a genuine knower would be a doer of noble deeds himself rather than one who praises them (599c), had Socrates not admitted and even stressed that Homer praises doers of noble deeds? (consider also Apology 28 b–d). And as we have already seen in the arguments concerning the poets’ appeal to the many, much of what the poets present supports the law or the morality of any time and place, above all through their presentation of the role of the divine in human life and so their affirmation of the great significance that the divine lends to human life. Even the tears that are shed in private attest to this support, inasmuch as the indulgence of the desire for those tears, unlike the secret indulgence of other pleasures, expresses a noble heart's sadness and its abiding hope for redemption.

Socrates alludes to this, in fact, in his final list of the passions that the poets nourish and cause to grow in the soul. He mentions “sex, and spiritedness, too, and . . .all the desires, pains, and pleasures in the soul” (606d). Spiritedness, the root of a sense of shame and nobility and love of honor, is here included as one of the passions sustained by the poets. (Destrée [Reference Destrée, Destrée and Herrmann2011, 277–78], who notes that spiritedness includes indignation against death rather than a measured calm in the face of it, is nonetheless certain that the spirited, moral life is the way to happiness.) And it is in this context that Socrates now states for the first time that there are praisers of Homer “who say that this poet educated Hellas.” In other words, Socrates is as aware that Homer's poetry sustains and forms the spiritedness of the Hellenes—of that part or aspect of their souls to which the law appeals and by which the law is upheld and honored—as he is both of the relief that Homer's poetry affords to the pain of the virtuous and of Homer's (rare) portrayal of the brief, serene acceptance of mortality by the first Hellene, Achilles.

SOCRATES’ CONCLUDING INVITATION TO TWO DEFENSES OF POETRY

Socrates’ indications of the discreet wisdom of Homer render less surprising the vital (Halliwell Reference Halliwell, Destrée and Herrmann2011, 254; contrast Rosen Reference Rosen and Rosen2005 and Murray Reference Murray1997, 12) conclusion of his argument, in which he offers a second apology for having brought up the subject of poetry and for appearing to display a “certain harshness and rusticity” in his argument. Regarding the latter especially, he invites the thought that because he is in truth not in the least harsh or rustic, his argument may be quite different than it first seems. As part of their apology for this rusticity he and Glaucon will tell “poetry” of an “ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry”— now suggesting for the first time that the poets are and have long been aware of, and hostile to, philosophy (cf. Laws 967c). That Homer at least was aware of philosophy is clear not only from Achilles’ reflections in Iliad IX but especially from the Odyssey (10.302–303), which contains the first extant use of the word “nature”—a use that points to the disclosure of necessities that cannot be overcome by any god (Ruderman Reference Ruderman, Palmer and Pangle1996, 49). But Socrates now offers four (otherwise unknown) rustic quotations as “signs” of “this old opposition”: “that ‘yelping bitch shrieking at her master,’ and ‘great in the empty eloquence of fools,’ ‘the mob of over-wise men holding sway,’ and ‘the refined thinkers who are really poor’” (607b–c). He implies— implausibly—that philosophy was in all of these statements the object of a harsh attack by “poetry” and suggests that philosophy is now merely finally fighting back, not against poetry but rather against “poetry directed to pleasure and imitation.” Yet because the quoted ancient attacks on philosophy appear somewhat spurious and certainly comic (Most Reference Most, Destrée and Herrmann2011), we wonder whether the fighting back is any less so.

Socrates certainly now opens wide the possibility that “poetry” herself—that is, actual poems (Halliwell Reference Halliwell, Destrée and Herrmann2011, 254; Janaway Reference Janaway1995, 153)—may be able to present an argument that poetry and imitation directed to pleasure should be permitted in a city with good laws—and that poetry's friends or protectors may, additionally, be able to present such an argument. He not only repeats that “we are aware that we are charmed by” such poetry, but pointedly asks whether Glaucon too is charmed by it, “especially when [he] contemplate[s] it through the medium of Homer” (607c3–d1); Glaucon admits that he is. Part of that charm, Socrates further suggests, lies in poetry's appeal to justice (607d), a suggestion that becomes more apparent when Socrates adds that he and Glaucon also would afford a second group, poetry's “protectors, those who aren't poets but friends of poetry” (philopoietai), an opportunity to speak on poetry's behalf. This group, to whom they would listen “benevolently,” would argue without meter that and how poetry is beneficial “to regimes and human life”—that is, beneficial not only to regimes or the city. And Socrates states explicitly why they would listen benevolently: “[S]urely we shall gain if [poetry] should turn out to be not only pleasant but also beneficial” (607d–e, emphasis added). What will determine whether what the poets say is worthwhile is not the justice of poetry's case—which would be argued by poetry itself, in charming meter—but the potential gain, the benefit not only to the regimes but also to an individual human life, a gain prosaically demonstrated by the poets’ friends in an argument stripped of meter, so that it will not charm one erotically away from this clear, rational consideration. We see how very far the argument, which this time is made with a view to the individual's genuine good, has moved from Book Three's firm exclusion of most imitative poetry. And because, as we have seen, a Homer does indeed possess the requisite knowledge to guide a human life toward what is genuinely beneficial, the openness of any city to his poetry will depend, like its openness to philosophy, on the extent to which it is open to the genuinely beneficial or to understanding the beautiful as the beneficial or useful (see 457b).

That no city is likely to be so open is suggested by Socrates’ conclusion, in which he presents a second, final, and emphatic suggestion about the connection between the charms of the poets and the charms of a human being with whom one falls erotically in love (cf. 601b). If the protectors and friends of the poets cannot convince him and Glaucon of poetry's benefit or gain, he states, then

The truth against which poetry's strong erotic charms tend has to do with what is beneficial or advantageous to an individual. Poetry's charms feed a strong pull away from what reason says is beneficial or advantageous—eros's pull away from awareness of our mortality and toward the deeply enchanting pleasure of devotion to the noble/beautiful. That Socrates should present poetry as appealing to eros and hence eros as in opposition to philosophy may be surprising, in light of how he has presented philosophy as similar to erotic activity to Glaucon earlier in the work (Republic 474c–475a, 485b–d, 499c). But although erotic longing for the transcendent, eternal life to be achieved through noble deeds appears, as indeed the case of Achilles makes clear, to be an indispensable precondition for the kind of serious reflection on death that Socrates has in mind, the continual indulgence of the erotic joy to be found in devotion to the noble involves a turning away from the hard truth, as does the more mysterious pleasure of indulging the desire for noble tears. And as we learn from the Symposium (203d8–e5), eros is the child of desire and resourcefulness: If we believe ourselves unable to acquire what we need, eros fades. Finally, if eros is for the noble and is as such ever concerned with an immortal good (Symposium 200d, 206e–7a), a firm awareness of our necessary mortality will mean its deep dormancy (Bartlett Reference Bartlett2008, 148–49; Bruell Reference Bruell1999; Bolotin Reference Bolotin1987; Levy Reference Levy2013, Lutz Reference Lutz1998, chapter 5; Leibowitz Reference Leibowitz2010; Stauffer Reference Stauffer2006, 92–121).

Poetry's enchanting pull must, Socrates concludes, be fought with a chant: “Poetry is childish and belongs to the many.” Yet chanting is manifestly subrational, and this chant, as we have seen, does not even fully reflect the truth. Why then does Socrates insist on it to the end? The chant is needed when and if poetry's defenders cannot demonstrate poetry's benefit and when poetry itself is unable “to make its defense, when we listen to it.” The defenders of poetry of whom Socrates speaks are not hard to imagine; they have included Socratics like Aristotle (in his Poetics). But how could “poetry” itself ever make the required defense while one is listening to it? In light of what we have seen, we may say that if one listens well to the work of a great poet like Homer, one will come to realize that such poets speak to at least two different audiences. They speak on one hand to the many, who enjoy the pleasure of lamentations but who fail to understand the rare “prudent and quiet character” (see again 604e–605a); reared in noble regimes, this audience naturally feels the charm of the poet who would relieve the suffering its members must feel when acting on behalf of the noble but who likewise supports devotion to justice and the noble, which affords hope and solace to the part of the soul that would weep—to the part that holds awareness of our mortality. The poets speak, on the other hand, to a few readers who benefit from the poetry and who take pleasure not only in the poets’ artful ennobling of their listeners, but also in observing the poets’ more quiet presentation of the truth about our mortality and all its ramifications. If one so reads the work of a Homer, as speaking simultaneously to different audiences—and Socrates has said that this is how he reads Homer (see 378d6–8 and context; see also Alcibiades II, 147c and Protagoras 345d–e)—one could, we gather, forego the “chanting.” It would nonetheless remain a genuine need for Glaucon and other erotic and spirited men whose interest is in preserving a city with good laws or the “regime in himself” (607b, with 592a–b).

By allowing the virtuous a respectable outlet for their grief, Homeric poetry edifies them, permitting them to return to their public devotion to the law with a renewed spirit; that is, without the sadness whose build-up threatens such devotion. Homeric poetry also makes its hearers’ devotion to law and the noble more graceful and humane rather than rigidly harsh, as Book Three shows that it might otherwise be. Finally, and paradoxically (but importantly), Homeric poetry's reminder of the problem—even and precisely for the virtuous—that the inevitability of death represents may well bind the virtuous all the more intensely to a life of noble deeds (as indeed it bound Achilles), since because such a life uniquely promises, in its appeal to the deepest erotic hopes, to overcome the necessity of death that poetry occasionally brings to light.

THE DEFICIENCY OF HOMERIC POETRY

I have attempted to highlight in Socrates’ second critique of poetry those aspects that tend to be neglected today and that show Socrates’ deep appreciation for and admiration of Homer's wisdom and his great accomplishment. I wish to turn in conclusion to what Socrates sees as a genuine deficiency of Homeric poetry, which comes clearly into sight only after these aspects are taken into account.

As we have seen, Socrates presents his second triad of user, craftsman, painter (601b–e), in which the true maker is said to be compelled to “listen to the man who knows”—that is, to the user, who judges what is made by its goodness, its appropriateness to the end at hand, and its capacity to produce beautiful or noble things. The knower of what is by nature, from whom the poet should (by this account) be taking his bearings, is the philosopher; poetry should be ministerial to the philosophic life, the life of coming to understand nature, as the best life. Now Homer, as we have noted, put briefly on display the kind of serious reflections on death, noble deeds, and a quiet life that for a time occupy Achilles in Book Nine of the Iliad. But Socrates appears to find that Homer did not sufficiently highlight those reflections or that way of life. Most readers—too many, it seems—would find those reflections to represent an ignoble temptation, successfully avoided by Achilles in his pursuit of the life of noble deeds on behalf of his friends. Homer, knowing of a life that is philosophic and indeed leading it (cf. Phaedrus 278b–d), nevertheless failed to make his poetry sufficiently ministerial to the kind of quiet, philosophic life to which such reflections as those of Achilles should lead.

Nor is this all. We have seen that the tests to which Socrates subjects Homer are incapable of demonstrating anyone's lack of knowledge. Yet one of those tests does point emphatically to Homer's failure to cultivate through his poetry an eponymous way of life in the manner of Pythagoras; or to have educated a small, private (idia, 600a9) group of intelligent “comrades;” or to have “been honored and cherished by them,” in the manner of Protagoras or Prodicus. Homer failed to sufficiently encourage the kind of sober, philosophic friendships within a private school of thought that would have helped keep his most philosophic teachings alive, in the way that not only these men but Socrates himself also encouraged. (Consider especially the opening of the Parmenides and of the Theatetus; cf. Apology of Socrates 39c–d.) What is more, as we have seen, Socrates claims that Homer's poetry could pose a powerful temptation away from the life of sober rationality even for a Socrates, through its masterful appeal to that within our awareness that craves tears. Despite his wisdom, then, Homer remained unaware of the extent to which he could have encouraged in more of his readers an austere life of knowing as the truly best life; relatedly, he was unaware of the possibility of cultivating philosophic friendships by founding a school of such readers—a school of Homerics. Or rather, as Socrates has not failed to show us, now that Homer's grand civilizational task, undertaken in a more rustic time, has succeeded, it can be incorporated into another, higher task—brought to a completion of which he would have fully approved.

This minor critique of autonomous Homeric poetry becomes fully apparent when we cease to ignore the fact that must obtrude on our thoughts at every turn of the argument that Socrates presents: A certain kind of imitative poetry, a kind that is indeed ministerial to the philosophic life as the best life, has actually come into being. Plato's poetry, which both provides through dialectic the path to the philosophic life and offers an ennobled portrait of philosophy as a way of life, may be said to bring an end to the quarrel between philosophy and poetry.Footnote ⁶ That Plato's poetry so often quotes Homer, “the first teacher and leader of all these noble tragic things,” is a measure of the deep kinship between the two thinkers—of their common understanding of the best way of life—which made it possible for Plato to end that quarrel.

PLATO AND POSTMODERN POLITICS

Plato's presentation of the quarrel between philosophy and poetry and his presentation of the philosophic way of life, far from springing from a fundamental insecurity or incapacity to face death, in truth make a firm awareness of death central to its preparation for that life, though significantly, it does not broadcast this fact to one and all. Perhaps a genuine grasp of mortality inclines against a trumpeting of it. It is certainly noteworthy in this regard that Heidegger, as Leo Strauss notes, presents Dasein, in its allegedly authentic turning away from eternity, as actually entailing an artificial “enhancing of the status of man and his ‘world.’” That is, despite Heidegger's apparent attention to death and being-toward-death, it is Heidegger who turns away from the ultimate decay of all things, in a forgetting of eternity (and hence of human mortality) begun not by Plato but by Hobbes. (Consider in this light the helpful remarks of Bruell Reference Bruell2003.) So too one finds alongside Tong's persistent and harsh critique of male “world building,” conducted over and against the awareness of death, a hope to engage in a new, nongendered type of “healed” world building (Tong Reference Tong2008, 143). And for all of Rorty's charges about Platonic philosophers rebelling against mortality, it is Rorty who redefines death so that it means not annihilation but merely “the failure to have created” and hence something that contains a promise of living on—of immortality (Reference Rorty1989, 24n1 and 27). The charge against Platonic philosophy appears from a genuine Platonic perspective to characterize postmodern thinking.

My study suggests that the Heideggerian account and the postmodern politics that relies on it represent a misunderstanding of Platonic philosophizing and of Plato's understanding of poetry. Those who today seek to overthrow rational guidance of our political lives in the name of hopes for poetic creativity may find it helpful to reconsider the Platonic alternative, which gives full due to both.