ing the gravest misstatements when
they tell us that wicked men are often happy, and the good miserable;
and that injustice is profitable when undetected, but that justice is a
man's own loss and another's gain--these things we shall forbid them to
utter, and command them to sing and say the opposite.

To be sure we shall, he replied.

But if you admit that I am right in this, then I shall maintain that you
have implied the principle for which we have been all along contending.

I grant the truth of your inference.

That such things are or are not to be said about men is a question which
we cannot determine until we have discovered what justice is, and how
naturally advantageous to the possessor, whether he seem to be just or
not.

Most true, he said.

Enough of the subjects of poetry: let us now speak of the style; and
when this has been considered, both matter and manner will have been
completely treated.

I do not understand what you mean, said Adeimantus.

Then I must make you understand; and perhaps I may be more intelligible
if I put the matter in this way. You are aware, I suppose, that all
mythology and poetry is a narration of events, either past, present, or
to come?

Certainly, he replied.

And narration may be either simple narration, or imitation, or a union
of the two?

That again, he said, I do not quite understand.

I fear that I must be a ridiculous teacher when I have so much
difficulty in making myself apprehended. Like a bad speaker, therefore,
I will not take the whole of the subject, but will break a piece off in
illustration of my meaning. You know the first lines of the Iliad,
in which the poet says that Chryses prayed Agamemnon to release his
daughter, and that Agamemnon flew into a passion with him; whereupon
Chryses, failing of his object, invoked the anger of the God against the
Achaeans. Now as far as these lines,

'And he prayed all the Greeks, but especially the two sons of Atreus,
the chiefs of the people,'

the poet is speaking in his own person; he never leads us to suppose
that he is any one else. But in what follows he takes the person of
Chryses, and then he does all that he can to make us believe that the
speaker is not Homer, but the aged priest himself. And in this double
form he has cast the entire narrative of the events which occurred at
Troy and in Ithaca and throughout the Odyssey.

Yes.

And a narrative it remains both in the speeches which the poet rec