innocence will not receive them after death; and that here on earth they will live ever in the likeness of their own evil selves, and with evil friends,—when they hear this, they in their superior cunning will seem to be listening to fools."—J.
And in the same spirit the first great "type" to which all legends must conform, in his ideal State, is that God is good, and is the author of good alone; the evil He suffers to exist for the just punishment of men. And therefore Plato will expunge from his new mythology all those false and debasing stories which Homer tells about the gods and heroes, with their violent passions, loves, and hatreds; where even the great Achilles is represented as insolent and cruel,—as slaying his captives, cursing the Sun-god himself, and dragging Hector's body round the walls of Troy. He will have no sensational pictures of the lower world, with all its horrors of Styx and Tartarus, and with the souls of the dead "fluttering like bats" in sunless caverns. And the music shall be simple and ennobling: he will banish the wailing Lydian and soft Ionian measures, and he will have only martial strains in the Dorian mood, such as Tyrtæus sang when the Spartans marched out to battle; and he will dismiss with honour from the State the charming and versatile poet who can assume all shapes and speak in all voices, and will take instead the rough but honest story-teller who will recite simple and useful tales.[1]
He again attacks the poets in the last book of the "Republic;" and here the ground of offence is their imi-
- ↑ Rep., iii. 398.
