Abstract

My interpretation of Plato's criticism of poetry has its foundation two claims, deceptively innocuous in themselves. First, I maintain that Plato's overriding concern lay in the welfare of his polis. Athens was declining rapidly in his day, not only economically and politically, but also culturally. This observation has led some commentators to maintain that Plato's criticism was directed at the degenerate state of the art and poetry of his day. Other authors, concentrating on the political aspect, have maintained that it was a disguised attack on the Sophists. Still others have claimed it to have been directed at the educational system, and several have taken Plato quite literally, assuming the criticism of poetry to have been neither more nor less than just that. What all these authors seem to have missed, however is that all of their interpretations rest upon one and the same feature of Plato's thought, and this is my second, more fundamental, claim: Plato attributed the decline of Athens to a tendency in popular thought to value the relative over the absolute. This tendency I recognize as the product of the activity and teachings of the Sophists, and I identify the distinguishing feature of Sophism as the techne of mimesis. This techne came to be employed in the interpretation and writing of poetry, in the practice of rhetoric in the courts and schoolrooms, and finally in the study of philosophy itself. It came, in short, to characterize all intellectual and cultural endeavor, and it brought with it the conception of virtue as relative, as something that could be taught and learned by means of the techne of mimesis, for it is the mastery of this techne which enables one to appear to be many things which one is not. And it is this techne of mimesis, along with the tendency toward ethical relativism which accompanied it, which is the true target of Plato's criticism of poetry