presentation of ideas through picturesque analogies, developed allegories like that of
the cave or the use of myth to push philosophical enquiry beyond the point at which
certain knowledge is possible, as in the myth of Er at the end of the Republic, in which
hegraphically represents the doctrine of the immortality of the soul and its rein-
carnation.
Much of the discussion of the preliminary education of the guardians is con-
cerned to modify the existing Greek programme, in which poetry and mythology
played a significant part. His treatment of the two go hand in hand, since he believed
that traditional mythology was largely the invention of the poets. He does not banish
poets and their stories altogether (the word for story is mythos), but poetry that tells
lies about the gods or shows heroes in a bad light, encouraging emotional excess in
those who read it, is condemned on moral and theological grounds. Here Plato is
renewing the objections of previous philosophers, for the battle between poetry and
philosophy had been going on since the early Ionian philosophers attacked the view
of the world (and especially of the gods) in the poems of Homer and Hesiod (Republic,
607b). Poetry on suitable subjects and myths that are morally edifying continue to
play a leading part in the education of the young (376e, 399b). Indeed, in the ideal
state, all the inhabitants, including the guardians, are to be persuaded of the truth of
a foundation myth which Plato calls a noble fiction (sometimes translated as ‘noble
lie’, for he uses the same word, pseudos, for fiction and falsehood, 414b–415d).
The existing pattern of Athenian education consisted of mousike paideia, relating
not only to music but to all the arts over which the nine Muses presided (including
literature, history and all the liberal arts), and gymnastike paideia, physical education.
They were designed to complement one another and produce the all-round individ-
ual. Plato envisages reform of this education to ensure that aesthetic development
and a strong moral sense run parallel. This preliminary education of the guardians,
which is designed to promote harmonious development of character rather than to
reach true knowledge, is to be followed by the study of mathematics, astronomy and
harmonics, not for any practical value but for the training of the mind. The motto ‘Let
no one who is ignorant of mathematics enter here’ was inscribed over the doors of
the Academy. The theorems and hypotheses of mathematics represent the reflections
of real things seen by the prisoners of the cave in the water, after they have been
newly released into the blinding light. Mathematical study leads to a knowledge of
greater reality than anything in the world of sense, and so is the best way of leading
the mind upward to a vision of the highest order of reality, the forms that are known
through dialectical reasoning (532c–d).
Plato objects to poetry as a mode of truth because it is a representation (mimesis,
sometimes translated ‘imitation’) of the world of appearances, which is itself a
distorted reflection of the transcendent world of unchanging and eternal forms. The
images of the poet (for which Plato’s word is eikones) are at two removes from reality,
202 THE GREEKS