among the blessed gods." How is a schoolmaster to reprove mirth effectively, if boys can quote
this passage? Fourth, there are passages in Homer praising rich feasts, and others describing the
lusts of the gods; such passages discourage temperance. ( Dean Inge, a true Platonist, objected to a
line in a well-known hymn: "The shout of them that triumph, the song of them that feast," which
occurs in a description of the joys of heaven.) Then there must be no stories in which the wicked
are happy or the good unhappy; the moral effect on tender minds might be most unfortunate. On
all these counts, the poets are to be condemned.
Plato passes on to a curious argument about the drama. The good man, he says, ought to be
unwilling to imitate a bad man; now most plays contain villains; therefore the dramatist, and the
actor who plays the villain's part, have to imitate people guilty of various crimes. Not only
criminals, but women, slaves, and inferiors generally, ought not to be imitated by superior men.
(In Greece, as in Elizabethan England, women's parts were acted by men.) Plays, therefore, if
permissible at all, must contain no characters except faultless male heroes of good birth. The
impossibility of this is so evident that Plato decides to banish all dramatists from his city:
When any of these pantomimic gentlemen, who are so clever that they can imitate anything,
comes to us, and makes a proposal to exhibit himself and his poetry, we will fall down and
worship him as a sweet and holy and wonderful being; but we must also inform him that in our
State such as he are not permitted to exist; the law will not allow them. And so when we have
anointed him with myrrh, and set a garland of wool upon his head, we shall. send him away to
another city.
Next we come to the censorship of music (in the modern sense). The Lydian and Ionian harmonies
are to be forbidden, the first because it expresses sorrow, the second because it is relaxed. Only
the Dorian (for courage) and the Phrygian (for temperance) are to be allowed. Permissible rhythms
must be simple, and such as are expressive of a courageous and harmonious life.
The training of the body is to be very austere. No one is to eat fish, or meat cooked otherwise than
roasted, and there must be no sauces or confectionery. People brought up on his regimen, he says,
will have no need of doctors.