Plato : POLITEIA Persons of the dialogue: Socrates - Glaucon - Polemarchus  - Adeimantus - Cephalus - Thrasymachus - Cleitophon Translated by Benjamin Jowett - 61 Pages (Part 1) - Greek fonts Search Plato's works / Plato Anthology / The Greek Word Library = Note by Elpenor

POLITEIA part 1 of 2, 3, 4, 5

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This Part: 61 Pages

Part 1 Page 61 (Last page of this part)

Then the first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorised ones only. Let them fashion the mind with such tales, even more fondly than they mould the body with their hands; but most of those which are now in use must be discarded.

Of what tales are you speaking? he said.

You may find a model of the lesser in the greater, I said; for they are necessarily of the same type, and there is the same spirit in both of them.

Very likely, he replied; but I do not as yet know what you would term the greater.

Those, I said, which are narrated by Homer and Hesiod, and the rest of the poets, who have ever been the great story-tellers of mankind.

But which stories do you mean, he said; and what fault do you find with them?

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