I do.

And literature may be either true or false?

Yes.

And the young are trained in both kinds, and in the false before the true?

I do not understand your meaning, he said.

You know, I said, that we begin by telling children stories. which, though not wholly destitute of truth, are in the main fictitious; and these stories are told them when they are not of an age to learn gymnastics.

Very true.

That was my meaning in saying that we must teach music before gymnastics.

Quite right, he said.

You know also that the beginning is the chiefest part of any work, especially in a young and tender thing; for that is the time at which the character is being formed and most readily receives the desired impression.

Quite true.

And shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which may be framed by casual persons, and to receive into their minds notions which are the very opposite of those which are to be held by them when they are grown up?

We cannot.

Then the first thing will be to have 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 desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorized ones only. Let them fashion the mind with their tales, even more fondly than they form the body with their hands; and 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 cast in the same mold, and there is the same spirit in both of them.

That may be very true, 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 storytellers of mankind.

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

A fault which is most serious, I said; the fault of telling a lie, and, which is more, a bad lie.

But when is this fault committed?

Whenever an erroneous representation is made of the nature of gods and heroes, like the drawing of a limner which has not the shadow of a likeness to the truth.

Yes, he said, that sort of thing is certainly very blamable; but what are the stories which you mean?

First of all, I said, there was that greatest of all lies in high places, which the poet told about Uranus, and which was a bad lie too, I mean what Hesiod says that Uranus did and what Cronus did to him. The doings of Cronus, and the sufferings which in turn his son inflicted upon him, even if they were true, ought certainly not to be lightly told to young and simple persons; if possible, they had better be buried in silence. But if there is an absolute necesssity for their mention, a chosen few might hear them in a mystery, and in order to reduce the number of hearers they should sacrifice not a common (Eleusinian) pig, but some huge and unprocurable victim.

Why, yes, said he, those stories are certainly objectionable. Yes, Adeimantus, they are stories not to be narrated in our State; the young man should not be told that in committing the worst of crimes he is far from doing anything outrageous; and that if he chastises his father when he does wrong, in any manner he likes, he will only be following the example of the first and greatest among the gods.

I quite agree with you, he said; in my opinion those stories are not fit to be repeated.

Neither, if we mean our future guardians to regard the habit of quarreling as dishonorable, should anything be said of the wars in heaven and of the plots and fightings of the gods against one another, which are quite untrue. Far be it from us to tell them of the battles of the giants, and embroider them on garments; or of all the innumerable other quarrels of gods and heroes with their friends and relations. If they would only believe us we would tell them quarreling is unholy, and that never up to this time has there been any quarrel between citizens; this is what old men and old women should begin by telling children, and the same when they grow up. And the poets should be required to compose accordingly. But the narrative of Hephaestus binding Here his mother, or how on another occasion Zeus sent him flying for taking her part when

she was being beaten, - such tales must not be admitted into our State, whether they are supposed to have an allegorical meaning or not. For the young man cannot judge what is allegorical and what is literal; anything that he receives into his mind at that age is apt to become indelible and unalterable; and therefore the tales which they first hear should be models of virtuous thoughts.

There you are right, he replied; that is quite essential: but, then, where are such models to be found? and what are the tales in which they are continued? when that question is asked, what will be our answer?

I said to him, You and I, Adeimantus, are not poets in what we are about just now, but founders of a State: now, the founders of a State ought to know the general forms in which poets should cast their tales, and the limits which should be observed by them, but actually to make the tales is not their business.

Very true, he said; but what are those forms of theology which you mean?

Something of this kind, I replied: God is always to be represented as he truly is; that is one form which is equally to be observed in every kind of verse, whether epic, lyric, or tragic.

Right.

And is he not truly good? and must he not be represented

And that which does no evil is the cause of no evil?

Impossible.

And the good is the advantageous ?

Yes.

And the good is the cause of well-being?

Yes.

The good is not the cause of all things, but of the good only, and not the cause of evil?

Assuredly.

Then God, if he be good, is not the author of all things, as the many assert, but he is the cause of a few things only, and not of most things that occur to men. For few are the goods of human life, and many are the evils, and the good is to be attributed to God alone; of the evils the cause is to be sought elsewhere, and not in him.

That appears to me to be most true, he said.

Then we must not listen to Homer or to any other poet who is guilty of the folly of saying that two casks

"Lie at the threshold of Zeus, full of lots, one of good, the other of evil lots,"

and that he to whom Zeus gives a mixture of the two

"Sometimes meets with evil fortune, at other times with good;" but that he to whom is given the cup of unmingled ill,

"Him wild hunger drives over the divine earth."

And again

"Zeus, who is the dispenser of good and evil to us."

And if a poet writes of the sufferings of Niobe, which is the subject of the tragedy in which these iambic verses occur, or of the house of Pelops, or of the Trojan war, or any similar theme, either we must not permit him to say that these are the works of God, or if they are of God, he must devise some explanation of them such as we are seeking: he must say that God did what was just and right, and they were the better for being punished; but that those who are punished are miserable and that God is the author of their misery, the poet is not to be permitted to say; though he may say that the wicked are miserable because they require to be punished, and are benefited by receiving punishment from God; but that God being good is the author of evil to any one, is to be strenuously denied, and not allowed to be sung or said in any well-ordered commonwealth by old or young. Such a fiction is suicidal, ruinous, impious.

THE TEN ATTIC ORATORS.

THE great critics of Alexandria placed ten names on their list, or canon, of the Athenian orators best worth remembrance; which, in the order Plutarch afterward wrote their biographies (essentially though not minutely chronological) were: Antiphon, Andocides, Lysias, Isocrates, Isæus, Æschines, Lycurgus, Demosthenes, Hyperides, Dinarchus. Specimens of the oratory of all are here collected for the first time, four translated specially for this work, and three of the orators represented in translation for the first time. We have arranged them a little differently to bring the debates on Demosthenes' public career together.

ANTIPHON, born about B.c. 480, was a pupil of Gorgias, the famous teacher of rhetoric. He was of the oligarchic party. Says Professor Jebb: "Antiphon was the ablest debater and pleader of his day, and in his person the new Rhetoric first appears as a political power at Athens. He took a chief part in organizing the Revolution of the Four Hundred, and when they fell was put to death by the people (B.c. 411)." Thucydides calls him one of the three best (i.e. most useful) men in Athens; which the organized assassinations by the Four Hundred make a strange adjective to our All his extant speeches are on trials for homicide.

ears.

ANDOCIDES, born about B.c. 467, and also belonging to the oligarchic party, was involved in that great and never fully explained scandal, the mutilation of the Hermæ just before the expedition to Syracuse (B.c. 415). Thrown into prison, he saved his life by denouncing four others, who were executed; but failed to clear himself, and was banished. He made application for return later on, again to the Four Hundred in 411, still again in 410 to the Assembly after their downfall; but failed, and was a traveling merchant till 402, when he returned under the general amnesty. He held important official positions thereafter, and died after 390, when, as ambassador to Lacedæmon to treat for peace, he made on his return the speech here excerpted.

LYSIAS, though born at Athens, (B.c. 459?) had a Syracusan father, spent his early and middle life in southern Italy, and only settled at Athens in 412, when growing old. He was a democrat. In 404 the Thirty Tyrants put his brother to death, and he fled; the next year, on their expulsion by Thrasybulus, he came back and impeached Eratosthenes, one of the Thirty, and some years later impeached one of their tools. He made other speeches on public affairs; but as with most of the others, his chief work was legal.

ISOCRATES, born B.C. 436, was a wealthy and highly educated youth, who lost his fortune in the troubles of the Peloponnesian