Plato saw the friend and apologist of
tyrants, and the Sophist of tragedy. The old comedy was almost extinct;
the new had not yet arisen. Dramatic and lyric poetry, like every other
branch of Greek literature, was falling under the power of rhetoric.
There was no 'second or third' to Aeschylus and Sophocles in the
generation which followed them. Aristophanes, in one of his later
comedies (Frogs), speaks of 'thousands of tragedy-making prattlers,'
whose attempts at poetry he compares to the chirping of swallows; 'their
garrulity went far beyond Euripides,'--'they appeared once upon the
stage, and there was an end of them.' To a man of genius who had a
real appreciation of the godlike Aeschylus and the noble and gentle
Sophocles, though disagreeing with some parts of their 'theology'
(Rep.), these 'minor poets' must have been contemptible and intolerable.
There is no feeling stronger in the dialogues of Plato than a sense of
the decline and decay both in literature and in politics which marked
his own age. Nor can he have been expected to look with favour on the
licence of Aristophanes, now at the end of his career, who had begun by
satirizing Socrates in the Clouds, and in a similar spirit forty years
afterwards had satirized the founders of ideal commonwealths in his
Eccleziazusae, or Female Parliament (Laws).

There were other reasons for the antagonism of Plato to poetry. The
profession of an actor was regarded by him as a degradation of human
nature, for 'one man in his life' cannot 'play many parts;' the
characters which the actor performs seem to destroy his own character,
and to leave nothing which can be truly called himself. Neither can any
man live his life and act it. The actor is the slave of his art, not the
master of it. Taking this view Plato is more decided in his expulsion of
the dramatic than of the epic poets, though he must have known that
the Greek tragedians afforded noble lessons and examples of virtue
and patriotism, to which nothing in Homer can be compared. But great
dramatic or even great rhetorical power is hardly consistent with
firmness or strength of mind, and dramatic talent is often incidentally
associated with a weak or dissolute character.

In the Tenth Book Plato introduces a new series of objections. First,
he says that the poet or painter is an imitator, and in the third
degree removed from the truth. His creations are not tested by rule and
measure; they are only appearances. In m