Poets

The poets, indeed, provide nectar, ambrosia, banquets, and Youth or Ganymede to serve the cups;

And because you do not see how Nature can do this without any mind, you take refuge in a god, like the tragic poets when you cannot unravel the outcome of the plot.

For these are scarcely more absurd than the things which, poured out in the words of the poets, have done harm by their very charm — poets who have brought in gods inflamed with anger and raging with lust, and have made us behold their wars, battles, combats, and wounds;

Then we must not accept from Homer such sayings as these either about the gods:

In such case then it appears he and the other poets effect their narration through imitation.

and so his style will depend wholly on imitation in voice and gesture, or will contain but a little of pure narration.

All the poets know them;

let them say before the tribunal, if they will, that Minos and Rhadamanthus, by the consent of Plato and the poets, have this lot;

For thus even the poets and philosophers set a tribunal among the dead.

for the Hyperborean and the Arimaspian cities and the Elysian plains are commonwealths of the just.

And to me it seems that the poets too call the elect among themselves "godlike" and "divine" and "like to the gods" and "equal to Zeus in counsel" and "having counsels like the gods" and "godlike in form"—nibbling, as it were, at the "according to the image and likeness.

Of the two kinds mentioned, which we should call the older in time among us Greeks — poetry or legislation — I could not say with assurance at present.

I mean that the kind belonging to the voluntary and persuasive is that of the poets, while that belonging to the necessary and prescriptive is that of the lawgivers;

For he is the common king and ruler and president and father of men and gods, and moreover the steward of peace and of war, as it seemed to the poets of old, who were both experienced and wise — if somehow we prove able to hymn his nature and power in a brief discourse, falling short of his worth, while saying just this much.

others have made studies in the poets;

All men take as much pleasure in listening to this kind of prose as in listening to poetry, and many desire to take lessons in it, believing that those who excel in this field are wiser and better and of more use to the world than men who speak well in court.

aye, the poets have related about the gods themselves tales more outrageous than anyone would dare tell concerning their enemies.

on the contrary, we shall be on our guard and consider equally guilty of impiety those who recite and those who believe such lies

For these blasphemies the poets, it is true, did not pay the penalty they deserved, but assuredly they did not escape punishment altogether;

Therefore I shall speak on the poets at another time provided that my age does not first carry me off and that I do not have something to say on subjects more important than this.

As to the poetry of Homer and Hesiod and the rest, I would fain speak—for I think that I could silence those who chant their verses and prate about these poets in the Lyceum—but I perceive that I am being carried beyond the due limits which have been assigned to an introduction;

For some of my friends met me and related to me how, as they were sitting together in the Lyceum, three or four of the sophists of no repute— men who claim to know everything and are prompt to show their presence everywhere—were discussing the poets, especially the poetry of Hesiod and Homer, saying nothing original about them, but merely chanting their verses and repeating from memory the clevere …

for these, they say, have proved the best counsellors for human conduct;

besides, a number of the poets of earlier times have left precepts which direct them how to live;

And do not imagine that you can afford to be ignorant of anyone either of the famous poets or of the sages;

To hand heroic actions down in verse;

Confederates and allies, when poets began

For after the public men I went to the poets, those of tragedies, and those of dithyrambs, and the rest, thinking that there I should prove by actual test that I was less learned than they.

Hence too the frenzy of the poets, who nourish human errors with their tales, in which Jupiter, beguiled by the pleasure of an embrace, was thought to have doubled the night.

The poets, accusers of the gods, Plato decreed should be banished;

Therefore, since the philosophers have contrived the physical by conjectures, the poets have drawn the mythical from fables, and the peoples have presumed the national of their own accord, where, then, is the truth to be placed?

The poets too, trembling not before the tribunal of Rhadamanthus nor of Minos, but of the unexpected Christ?

Then the poets are vain, when they assign to the gods human passions and fables;

Certainly the soul is prior to literature, and discourse prior to the book, and sense prior to the pen, and man himself prior to the philosopher and poet.

Surely, for all the poets sing of him, how that he was envied for his wisdom and done to death by Odysseus.

The object of this, in my opinion, is not that the citizens may vote for the same choirs, not that they may praise the same flute-players, not that they may select the same poets, not that they may like the same things, but that they may obey the laws.

He was informed that Euthydemus, the handsome, had formed a large collection of the works of celebrated poets and professors, and therefore supposed himself to be a prodigy of wisdom for his age, and was confident of surpassing all competitors in power of speech and action.