Abstract

In book 3 of his Republic, Plato has Socrates undertake an assessment of the educational curriculum that the city (which is being constructed by him in speech) will implement for its youth. Consequently we see that Socrates assigns to poetry a crucial importance; by their imitation of it, poetry shapes the citizens with an initial formation, casts them within a certain orientation, and places them on a path leading in an already conceived direction, toward some unarticulated good. Thus, in forming this city and the souls of its citizens, Socrates first conducts a censorship of the content of the formative myths of the city in an attempt to orchestrate a certain fail-safe against ambiguity and against falling off ..