Published in our Summer 2025 issue

When Plato was an infant, bees alighted on his lips and, nestling there, set about making honey. His parents had placed him, sleeping, on the summit of a mountain while they paid tribute to the gods, and when they turned their attention back to him, they found the infant’s mouth full of golden sweetness. Cicero provides our first surviving record of the legend, which is repeated with variations over centuries, always as a portent of the sweet style the infant would ultimately possess.

Plato’s honeyed voice was celebrated in classical antiquity by thinkers as different as Aristotle, Cicero, and Diogenes Laertius. Praise for Plato’s literary genius regularly recurs until at least the early nineteenth century. As the Romantic poet Percy Shelley writes, “Plato was essentially a poet—the truth and splendour of his imagery, and the melody of his language, are the most intense that it is possible to conceive.”

So it is odd that Plato is now so often presented as the great enemy of poetry. It is true that in Book X of The Republic, narrated by Socrates, Plato does—famously—contemplate banishing the poets from his ideal city. This episode has become the principal point of reference for the now-conventional picture of Plato as poetry’s adversary, a view widely held by the likes of classicists and philosophers, literary critics, and many thousands with a much lighter acquaintance with Plato. That’s not to say the question doesn’t continue to occasion fierce debate in certain circles: the more than two millennia of literature on Plato’s relationship to poetry are far from settled. But over the last half-century, that scholarly nuance seems to have become partially eclipsed and replaced by an offhand, common-sense view that has hardened into dogma.

Classicist Stephen Halliwell, protesting this misunderstanding, decries “the standard reading of Plato’s supposedly outright ‘hostility’ to poetry and the tired, reductive slogan that Plato ‘banished the poets.’” Held even by “acute readers” of Plato like philosophers Myles Burnyeat and Hans-Georg Gadamer, the view is described by Halliwell as a “bleak and I think mistaken modern orthodoxy.” In a 2015 New Yorker article about Sappho, Daniel Mendelsohn writes that Plato “is said to have called [Sappho] the Tenth Muse.” But lest there be any confusion, he adds that “Plato, whose attitude toward literature was, to say the least, vexed . . . thought most poetry had no place in the ideal state.” And in a recent New Yorker piece, Agnes Callard agrees with interviewer Rachel Aviv when Aviv dismisses as “silly” some lines by Rainer Maria Rilke. This is “why Socrates thought the poets didn’t know what they were talking about,” Callard then adds.

Was Plato really hostile to poets? Or did he, rather, insist on the crucial importance of poetry to almost every subject he placed before us?

Mendelsohn and Callard are devotees of both Plato and literature, and are cited here just to make visible the intractability of the position. Each offers a casual gesture, not because either takes Plato lightly (far from it), but because the point is now so uncontroversial and so familiar that nothing more is needed. Remember Plato? He was an enemy of the poets.

But was Plato really hostile to poets? Or did he, rather, insist on the crucial importance of poetry—imaginative, emotionally evocative, and able to provide access to cognitive powers otherwise unavailable—to almost every subject he placed before us? The stakes of the question are high for three reasons.

First, there is presumably a true answer and we ought to find out what it is. Alfred North Whitehead wrote that all European philosophy is “a series of footnotes to Plato.” So as the footnotes keep coming, we should try to get the original right. But there are more practical concerns as well. Plato carries such weight that placing scorn for poetry in his voice misleads people into believing that they suffer no intellectual harm when they ignore poetry, as most citizens today do. Moreover, classrooms, countries, and international communities need great philosophy; cutting off philosophers from poetry’s expressive resources—confining them to abstract, rational argument—sabotages their essential work. How, then, did Plato regard the poets? And what do we miss if we get the answer wrong?

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Over the course of his dialogues, Plato quotes Homer 150 times, with passages from all but one of the Iliad’s twenty-four books. Socrates and others in the dialogues who quote poetry do so from memory. Plato positions Socrates in competition with Homer, whose Iliad and Odyssey—recited by rhapsodes at the Panathenaea every fourth year—had a colossal civic presence. Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus, and Aristophanes placed their verse plays in competition each spring in the Great Dionysia Festival. Such contests conveyed a shared object of emulation, a realm of value and beauty each contestant aspired to occupy. Plato explicitly conjures forth such matches in his dialogues: the Symposium takes place on the day one of its participants, Agathon, has just received the city’s prize for tragedy; in Phaedrus, Socrates seeks to show that he is a better rhetorician than Lysias, whose speeches Phaedrus at first holds in high regard; in Ion, Socrates proves himself a better rhapsode than Ion, who at the opening has just won a prize for recitation in another city.

Even dialogues that are not directly about the verbal arts often foreground Socrates’s poetic genius. This is strikingly so in the four extraordinary dialogues that record the city’s accusation against Socrates (Euthyphro), his trial (Apology), his imprisonment (Crito), and the night of his execution (Phaedo). Plato, according to Diogenes Laertius, intended the four to be read together as a tetralogy, “like those of the tragic poets.”

These dialogues explore essential philosophical ideas. One, we have a duty of justice. As Socrates says in Crito, “Both in war and in the law courts and everywhere else you must do whatever your city and your country command, or else persuade it in accordance with universal justice.” Two, we have an obligation to accept punishment from the state, founded on the doctrine of “tacit consent.” By residing in a country, we in effect give our consent to its laws, which creates an obligation to obey. For this reason, Socrates in Crito refuses to accept his friends’ pleas to escape to another land. And three, the demands of justice do not change as death nears. Socrates argues, again in Crito, that the principles of justice cannot be modified just because he has suffered “this accident” that is leading to his execution. As time runs out—as it did for Socrates—we should change the way we think about death, not about justice: “those who really apply themselves . . . to philosophy are . . . preparing themselves for dying and death,” and “courage belongs primarily to the philosophical disposition,” he declares in Phaedo. Where is the poet in the exploration of these philosophical ideas? Everywhere.

The four dialogues enact a verbal tour de force relentlessly yoked to poetry. In the Euthyphro, we learn that Socrates has been indicted for the acts of heresy and corrupting the youth. Among the many translations of the indictment, only Benjamin Jowett’s names the real charge: “He brings a wonderful accusation against me, which at first hearing excites surprise: he says that I am a poet [emphasis added] or maker of gods, and that I invent new gods and deny the existence of old ones.” Explaining the charge of heretical invention, Euthyphro says it is “because of your saying you are constantly visited by your supernatural voice.” The significance of such visitation is not explained here, though it is directly linked with poetic inspiration in dialogues such as Ion, Phaedrus, Crito, and Phaedo. Instead, Socrates announces that he is descended from Daedalus, the great sculptor.

The fame of Daedalus arises from his making lifelike statues that appear to move. Both Socrates and Euthyphro remark that Socrates’s verbal arguments and sentences are so lithe and nimble that they have this same aura of motion. The art that Daedalus carries out in material artifacts, Socrates and his interlocutors carry out in verbal artifacts. Socrates concludes playfully that he must then be “a greater genius in my art than Daedalus was; he only gave his own works the power of movement, whereas I apparently give it to other people’s as well as my own.” This framing of Socrates as the offspring of Daedalus is just the warm-up for the poetic honors Plato will eventually confer on him in the tetralogy.

In the Apology, after his conviction and death sentence, Socrates addresses himself not to the full jury of 501, but to the minority of 141 who voted against execution. He speaks to console them, or—as he puts it—to reconcile them to the result. They should not feel sorrow because one of two things is true: either there is no consciousness after death, in which case death will have the sweetness of a night of dreamless sleep; or instead, there will be consciousness after death in the immortal realm. Here is the way he describes the second alternative:

If on the other hand death is a removal from here to some other place, and if what we are told is true, that all the dead are there, what greater blessing could there be than this, gentlemen? . . . Put it in this way. How much would one of you give to meet Orpheus and Musaeus, Hesiod and Homer? I am willing to die ten times over if this account is true.

Imagining an immortal realm where everyone who ever lived and died is present, Socrates assumes his listeners—and certainly he himself—would most like to speak with Homer, Hesiod, Orpheus, and Musaeus. Plato and Socrates considered these four among the greatest poets, as Ion and other dialogues make clear.

Now at this point—midway through the tragic tetralogy—a question has surely begun to arise in my reader’s mind: How can the claim that Plato is opposed to poets possibly survive the inconvenient celebration they are accorded here in what are surely among the most important moments in Socrates’s life? We can catch a glimpse of how this takes place by consulting some of the dialogues’ most popular translations.

First is a Penguin translation by Hugh Tredennick, still in use today but altered from the version in wide circulation from the 1950s to 1993. That edition takes the sentence in the Apology— “How much would one of you give to meet Orpheus and Musaeus, Hesiod and Homer?”—and appends three footnotes to the names of these poets. The footnote for Orpheus reads: “Orpheus is no doubt mentioned not as a singer and a poet but as the founder of Orphism.” Of Musaeus we learn that he “was a bard like Orpheus, but his benefactions consisted in giving oracles for the curing of disease.” The note appended to Hesiod—less quick to sidestep his poetry—says: “Hesiod of Ascra in Boeotia was the first didactic poet; he was generally ranked next after Homer in antiquity and merit.” The fact that all four poets can be associated with instruction or revelation is a potentially illuminating point. But Tredennick’s clear implication is that Socrates is excited to meet Musaeus, Orpheus, and Hesiod for some reason other than their poetry.

Where is the poet in the exploration of these philosophical ideas? Everywhere.

If problems posed by proper names can be so easily muted, one can appreciate how much more easily ordinary nouns and adjectives can be modified to eliminate any suggestion that Socrates or Plato revered poets and poetry. In Ion, the Greek word for “beauty” and “beautiful”—kalos, kalè, kalon—appears multiple times in close association with poetry: it is used to describe the best epics, the best lyrics, and the single best encomium. But kalos is sometimes (for example, in the translations by Lane Cooper and W. R. M. Lamb) rendered not by the word “beautiful” but instead by words such as “lovely,” “splendid,” or “fine”—all of which are accurate and acceptable translations for kalos but which sever it from the great philosophic matter embedded in beauty, a subject Plato elaborately addresses in Phaedrus, Symposium, and Greater Hippias.

The act of bypassing the word “beautiful” in a work like Ion that is exclusively about poetry makes it possible for scholars to believe the two realms are separate. So decoupled are beauty and art in the contemporary reception of Plato that Nickolas Pappas’s otherwise brilliant article on “Plato’s Aesthetics” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy actually begins:

If aesthetics is the philosophical inquiry into art and beauty (or “aesthetic value”), the striking feature of Plato’s dialogues is that he devotes as much time as he does to both topics and yet treats them oppositely. Art, mostly as represented by poetry, is closer to a greatest danger than any other phenomenon Plato speaks of, while beauty is close to a greatest good. Can there be such a thing as “Plato’s aesthetics” that contains both positions?

What is relevant is not just the explicit mentions of artworks and names of tragedians or poets, but the many times when a dialogue calls attention to its own artistry or congratulates Socrates on his moments of ecstatic transmission. If proper nouns can be altered through footnotes and key nouns can be given alternative translations, then affirmations of poetry that are only implicit have close to zero chance of surfacing. But we have taken our intermission—between the first two dialogues in the tetralogy, Euthyphro and Apology, and the second two, Crito and Phaedo—long enough.

In Crito and Phaedo, Plato takes this alliance between Socrates and poetry further, attributing to Socrates direct acts of poetic composition in plays, hymns, and fables, conferring on him the title of poet, and counseling his friends and followers that his most important and difficult-to-replace work on Earth was that of the poet.

In Crito, Socrates responds to the counsel that he escape by staging a play for Crito in which the Laws (ventriloquized by Socrates) scold Socrates for contemplating such an act. The Laws describe what a ludicrous piece of theater Socrates would carry out if he attempted to escape to Thessaly by “arraying [himself] in some costume or putting on a shepherd’s smock or some other conventional runaway’s disguise.” But the delight here is that the Laws announce this repudiation of theatrical escapades from within a piece of theater: Socrates’s act of throwing his voice into the Laws, and thereby personifying and materializing them. The ventriloquism, an act of poesis, conveys a literal truth. When we consent to the rule of law, we throw our voices into the law and animate it; when we break the law, we take life from it.

Socrates’s mimesis of his conversation with the Laws is framed by two mystical events that begin and end the dialogue. Crito opens with Socrates reporting his dream to Crito: “I thought I saw a gloriously beautiful woman dressed in white robes, who came up to me and addressed me in these words: ‘Socrates . . .’” And here she begins to recite Homer in lines that Socrates interprets as predicting the timing of his execution.

By the end of Crito, the figures of the Laws and of the visionary female presence have converged. Socrates says: “That, my dear friend Crito, I do assure you, is what I seem to hear [the Laws] saying, just as a mystic seems to hear the strains of music, and the sound of their arguments rings so loudly in my heard that I cannot hear the other side.” As Socrates externalizes his vision in the drama of the Laws, so the law is brought within him in the female dream figure and the music of the mystic ringing in his ears.

The bond between philosopher and poet reaches a climax in Phaedo, where Socrates’s puzzled friends find him in prison on the eve of his execution. He is composing a hymn to Apollo and an adaptation of Aesop into verse. “In the course of my life,” Socrates explains, “I have often had the same dream, appearing in different forms at different times, but always saying the same thing, ‘Socrates, practice and cultivate the arts.’” He further explains that “because philosophy is the greatest of the arts, and [he] was practicing it,” he had always believed himself to be in compliance. But ever since the trial, he has worried “it might be this popular form of art the dream intended me to practice, in which case I ought to practice it and not disobey.”

Here, on the eve of death, Socrates fully embraces poetry. The play he staged in Crito was a stately piece of political philosophy. But here in Phaedo, the poetry is an overtly fictional fable. Socrates emphasizes this fictionality when he explains why he turned from hymn to fable:

When I had finished my hymn, I reflected that a poet, if he is to be worthy of the name, ought to work on imaginative themes, not descriptive ones, and I was not good at inventing stories. So I availed myself of some of Aesop’s fables which were ready to hand and familiar to me, and I versified the first of them that suggested themselves.

Socrates’s disclaimer that he is not good at invention and must therefore piggyback on Aesop’s ingenuity reminds us that what originally prompted his friends’ inquiry about his poems was his on-the-spot invention of a fable and his judgment that Aesop would have offered the fable to the world, had he only thought of it:

Socrates sat up on the bed and drew up his leg and massaged it, saying as he did so, What a queer thing it is, my friends, this sensation which is popularly called pleasure! It is remarkable how closely it is connected with its conventional opposite, pain. They will never come to a man both at once, but if you pursue one of them and catch it, you are nearly always compelled to have the other as well; they are like two bodies attached to the same head. I am sure that if Aesop had thought of it he would have made up a fable about them, something like this—God wanted to stop their continual quarreling, and when he found that it was impossible, he fastened their heads together; so wherever one of them appears, the other is sure to follow after. That is exactly what seems to be happening to me. I had a pain in my leg from the fetter, and now I feel the pleasure coming that follows it.

Even before Socrates composes his new Aesopian fable, he is already working as a fabulist by picturing us racing after either pleasure or pain, successfully grabbing hold of one, only to find we are also holding the other in our hands.

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The three genres that Socrates composes in Apology and Phaedo—play, hymn, and fable—occur throughout Plato’s dialogues.

As in theater we are used to “the play within the play,” so many of Plato’s dialogues contain a dialogue within a dialogue: Socrates ventriloquizes Diotima’s school of love (Symposium), Phaedrus re-enacts the speech of Lysias (Phaedrus), Socrates reports the way an “insolent” man challenged his ideas about beauty (Greater Hippias).

Hymns of praise to the gods recur in dialogues like Critias and Laws, and a palinode to the gods for having misspoken takes place when Socrates in Phaedrus explicitly offers his elaborate speech on love to make amends for earlier having impiously argued that the nonlover is better for Phaedrus than the lover.

The dialogues are saturated with fables as well. The Symposium contains Aristophanes’s fable about the division of spherical humans into two hemispheres longing to reunite, a fable that has no known source in the comic playwright outside of this dialogue. Sometimes, to be sure, Plato’s mythmaking may seem decorative: Phaedrus tells the entrancing story about the ceaseless songs of the cicadas. Often, however, it delivers the central philosophic idea—the myth of the cave in the Republic, the charioteer with his white and black horses in Phaedrus, and the ladder of love in the Symposium. Poetic devices—plays-within-plays, praise poems, and fables—are, then, as Platonic as his metaphysical theory of the forms.

Poetic devices are as Platonic as his metaphysical theory of the forms.

How, then, is Plato’s immense admiration for poetry—and not just admiration, but powerfully poetic philosophical writing—denied in the face of such relentless affirmations? Perhaps because the tetralogy recounting the conviction and death of Socrates comprises early Platonic dialogues, before Plato turned against poetry. This explanation has the weakness that the highest number of references to poetry occur in the Laws, among the last of Plato’s works. This inconvenient reminder generates a new explanation: poetry saturates the Laws because it is about the real state, not the Republic’s ideal state, and alas, there’s no way to get rid of poetry in reality. And if a commitment to poetry is found to saturate a middle dialogue—as Martha Nussbaum’s virtuosic analysis of Phaedrus demonstrates—it can be attributed to a sudden change of heart. As quickly as Plato’s commitment to poetry is swatted down, it rises up again. Early, middle, and late dialogues: Plato’s affirmations of poetry are everywhere.

Perhaps the most powerful affirmation comes at the close of the Phaedo. The subject is death. With death for Socrates just an hour or so away, the arguments about why we should not fear it seem unconvincing to his friends. You know, Socrates, one of them says, even after all your arguments, “there is a child within us to whom death is a sort of hobgoblin; him too we must persuade not to be afraid when he is alone with him in the dark.” Socrates matter-of-factly provides the remedy to this seemingly remediless terror: “Let the words of the charmer be applied daily until you have charmed him away.” The friend replies, in a sentence that must alter the heartbeat of many readers, “And where shall we find a good charmer of our fears, Socrates, when you are gone?”

Socrates counsels them that they must search everywhere across familiar and unfamiliar civilizations—“seek for him among them all, far and wide”—because it is the most important thing they can do. They then resume their dialogue until the sun sets, the hemlock is provided, and Socrates gradually ceases to speak.

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Why, then, the great exception in the* Republic*? Why does Plato launch an assault on poetry in there? It is only one out of dozens of dialogues, but many people regard it as Plato’s most important work. Is it truly an exception or does it, in the end, conform to the affirmation of poetry found in the other dialogues?

Throughout the Republic, Socrates acknowledges that “Homer is the greatest of poets and first of tragedy writers.” He, Socrates, has always been “charmed” and “delighted” by—no, much more than that, he greatly loves—Homer: “I have always from my earliest youth had an awe and love of Homer, which even now makes the words falter on my lips.” If, he tells Glaucon, they at last conclude they must banish the poets, they will only do so in the way a lover severs himself with great pain from a beloved.

But have the beloved poets been banished by the end of the Republic? There are five reasons why, despite the dialogue’s threat to banish the poets from the ideal state (kallipolis, the beautiful city), we should recognize that, in fact, no such banishment takes place.

First, Plato’s contemporaries would be acutely aware that while the perfect state might or might not evict the poets, one very imperfect state had actually evicted a poet: that city was Athens, and the poet was Socrates. Socrates had already been dead for some twenty years when the Republic was written. Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito are generally assumed to have been written close to the time of Socrates’s death, and Phaedo closer in time to the Republic. Not only the death of Socrates, but Plato’s insistence on Socrates’s stature as a poet would be clear in the minds of early listeners and should be kept clearly in our own minds as we listen to him 2,400 years later.

Some of Socrates’s criticisms of the poets mimic the charges leveled against him: impiety to the gods and reckless teaching that endangers the state. Other charges differentiate them. Socrates’s punishment was amplified by his refusal to weep or lament his fate during his trial, while one of his harshest critiques of poets in the Republic is their surrender to agonized lamentation: he berates the mourning of Achilles for Patroclus and the mourning of Priam for Hector—scenes at the heart of the Iliad. Soldiers should not, in Plato’s account, surrender to grief because they should not mentally absent themselves from battle, just as Socrates in refusing to surrender to sentiment during his trial, keeps his mind agile and alert to the philosophic battle.

Both the overlap and the difference bring to mind the earlier historical ousting of a “poet.” While Socrates’s critiques of the poets enable him to mount a comeback to his accusers, the fifth-century audience of the Republic—now seemingly being asked to assent to the banishment of poets—would be on guard, mindful of the catastrophic loss to the city that came with Socrates’s own banishment. Perhaps the case for banishing poets would have been heard less as an affirmative recommendation and more as a cautionary tale about the ideal city.

A second reason for concluding that the poets are not banished, or banished for long, is that Plato is—at the very moment of writing the Republic—weaving a great, imaginative artwork, a philosophic dialogue dependent at key stations on mythmaking. His Myth of the Metals tells people that they are made of different stuff, which justifies their different social roles; the Myth of the Cave provides a vivid rendering of the ascent from ignorance to knowledge; and the Myth of Er, which we will come to soon, provides a picture of cosmic justice. The Republic’s ten books are saturated with similes and metaphors, all the while providing a vivid mimesis of human beings in conversation (when there are no human beings actually present). Perhaps we should regard Book X as a poetics according to which the Republic itself is written and which therefore makes the dialogue immune to its criticisms.

Simplifying his more complex argument, Plato offers at least two main criticisms of poetry. Wrongful poets err by producing a third-order imitation, an image of an image of fundamental reality. They re-enact the actions of mortal souls and states that are themselves re-enactments of the ideal forms of city and soul. Plato, in contrast, provides a second-order imitation, an image at only one remove from the ideal polis and ideal soul. The problem is not poetic images, but the distance from fundamental reality of the images of images that wrongful poets offer. In addition, wrongful poets try to obscure how vacant their subject matter is by the rhythmic seduction of poetic meter. Plato, in contrast, will here speak exclusively in prose (or as Aristotle noted, something between poetry and prose).

Third, even as he makes the case for expulsion, Socrates arranges for two avenues of reprieve and return—hypothetical avenues that, as the fourth and fifth reasons below will show, Plato then actualizes:

Notwithstanding this [referring here to the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry], let us assure our sweet friend and the sister arts of imitation that if she will only prove her title to exist in a well-ordered State we shall be delighted to receive her—we are very conscious of her charms; but we may not on that account betray the truth. I dare say, Glaucon, that you are as much charmed by her as I am, especially when she appears in Homer?

Yes, indeed, I am greatly charmed.

Shall I propose, then, that she be allowed to return from exile, but upon this condition only—that she make a defence of herself in lyrical or some other metre?

Shortly before this passage, the Republic has Socrates explicitly fault “epic or lyric verse” for “allow[ing] the honeyed muse to enter,” and by doing so, to displace the rule of “law and reason” with that of “pleasure and pain.” Yet now it is that very honeyed voice of lyrical meter that is invited to make a defense. Socrates then offers a second avenue of reprieve, this time without meter:

And we may further grant to those of her defenders who are lovers of poetry and yet not poets the permission to speak in prose on her behalf: let them show not only that she is pleasant but also useful to States and to human life, and we will listen in a kindly spirit; for if this can be proved we shall surely be the gainers I mean, if there is a use in poetry as well as a delight?

Certainly, he said, we shall [be] the gainers.

Socrates’s two proposals—even if only hypotheticals—open up a breathing space, a place of grace. Further, he places no time limit on these two avenues of reprieve. They need not happen before the dialogue ends, nor even before Athens disappears. But as it happens, we do not wait long before they arrive.

Fourth, no sooner have the poets been banished than the Republic concludes with its Myth of Er, which readers often ignore, dismiss as curiously at odds with the banishment, or disparage: Julia Annas, who has written extensively on Plato, describes it as “vulgar,” “childish,” even “lame and messy.” But the Myth of Er—with one of our earliest references to the Pythagorean music of the spheres—indeed shows that the poetic mind can contribute to “the well-ordered state” and provide something “useful to States and to human life,” the strong requirements Socrates stipulated.

Throughout the Republic, Plato argues that human souls will more easily become just if the state is just, and that the state will more easily achieve just arrangements if its inhabitants are just, a reciprocal influence explored in detail by Jonathan Lear. But what if something greater than soul or state, the cosmos itself, is not just? How will soul and state maintain their justness under a bent sky?

The Myth of Er provides an account of cosmic justice that offers three assurances of human justice. One assurance is provided by the marvel of the music of the spheres—“harmony” within both soul and state, we have earlier learned, is nearly identical with justice, and surely cosmic harmony will help to inspire it. A second assurance is the connection affirmed in the myth between one’s life on earth and what happens in the afterlife: the just are rewarded with upward lift into a thousand years of heaven and the unjust with a downward fall into a thousand years of torment.

The third and most needed assurance is not about the afterlife, but the beforelife. Early in the Republic, we learn that some of us are born to be potters, some weavers, and still others guardians of the city; how can it be just if some are born into wealthy circumstances and others are poor and others enslaved; some are of one gender, some of another? The Republic instructs that justice consists in playing the hand one has been dealt, that which “they have in their hands.” The “original principle . . . at the foundation of the State” is to “practice . . . the thing to which his nature was best adapted.” We have a just city when each of the three classes in the city—the classes of artisan-producers, warriors, and philosopher-rulers—does what its nature is best suited to. This harmony of parts, rooted in natural differences, is not only the principle of justness but also “the condition and the cause” of all the other virtues—wisdom, courage, and temperance. But what about the natural endowments themselves: What are we to make of the sheer fortuitousness of their distribution? How does justice address the sheer but fateful moral luck of being dealt the hand of a ruler or the hand of an artisan?

The Myth of Er, with its cosmic architecture—part rower’s trireme, part weaver’s loom, part musician’s lute—is the answer. Over eternity, each person will come to occupy all possible positions on Earth. The position—whether this time as a guardian-ruler or next time as a carpenter, mason, or soldier—will be the combined result of chance and choice: chance, because a blindfolded lottery will dispassionately deal out to all souls the numerical position in which they get to choose their next lives; and choice, because each soul will, on the basis of their most recent life, choose the next incarnation from the remaining options.

The myth instructs the carpenter not to resent the more fortunate circumstance of the guardian ruler, since over time we each will have a turn at all those roles. We may strongly disagree with Plato about the importance of staying within one’s own position: today we often take easy social mobility as a key criterion for measuring the justness of a particular country. Given, however, Plato’s insistence on playing the hand one has been dealt, the Myth of Er is a liberating gift since it enables one to concentrate on excelling where one stands rather than endlessly striving for “improving” one’s social location. This thought experiment illustrates the usefulness of poetic mythmaking to soul and state and thereby assures poets a permanent place in the beautiful city. The banishment edict does not even survive as long as the book in which it is announced.

A final reason we should recognize the survival of the poets is that the critique of poetry given in the Republic is directly challenged by the sequence of dialogues in which Plato places the work: Republic, Timaeus, Critias. In the Republic, the conversation among Socrates, Glaucon, Thrasymachus, and their companions does not take place in the present moment. It has already taken place “yesterday” and is being reported by Socrates to other friends not themselves named in the Republic. But they are named at the opening of Timaeus, where Socrates says he has done his part by describing the beautiful city. Timaeus and Critias (and one other, whom we eventually learn is Hermocrates) now must do theirs. All four dialogues (Republic, Timaeus, Critias, and that of Hermocrates, which might have been intended to appear in Critias or in an unwritten dialogue bearing Hermocrates’s own name) are entries in a competition like those entered into by playwrights in the Great Dionysian Festival.

Many ancient commentators grouped the Republic, Timaeus, and Critias together. Modern scholars cast doubt on this alliance of the three dialogues, noting that the time of year appears to be different, with the Republic taking place on the Bendideia in late May and Timaeus and Critias taking place at the Panathenaea in midsummer. But recently, Nerea Terceiro Sanmartin has convincingly shown that Timaeus and Critias take place not at the Panathenaea but at a lesser festival for Athena, the Kallynteria, which comes two days after the Bendideia. The three dialogues are therefore temporally consistent.

When Timaeus opens, Socrates is asked to summarize what he said last night and he proceeds to sketch the Republic’s account of justice. At the opening of Critias, after the astronomer Timaeus has closed his incandescent account of the creation of the world, we are about to hear Critias’s account of the earliest Athenians. Critias asks for “indulgence” since any account of a human society will be judged more “severely” than a depiction (as in Timaeus) of the immortal realm because everyone has seen the former but no one the later.

Critias’s description of Timaeus—as a narrative that more easily receives a generous reception than the one he is about to give—applies to Socrates’s account in the Republic, which was of an ideal (not a real) city. Critias thereby suggests that a second-order imitation—an imitation of true reality—may not, after all, be superior to a third-order imitation of the imitation, but may instead garner our praise only because, having no experience of the ideal, we cannot easily critique a narrative about it.

If we turn back to the opening of Timaeus, we see that this challenge to the superiority of second-order accounts over third-order accounts has already been introduced by Socrates himself. Here he worries that however fine his recitation has been in the Republic, there is something missing: it is not “alive,” he confesses; it has “no motion” (like a painting of an animal standing still rather than running). His picture, he says, would be better if he could show the ideal state once it goes to war (oh, like the banished Iliad?, we wonder).

Here at the opening of Timaeus, Critias reveals that the Republic provoked a sense of déjà vu. Once he regained his bearings, he realized that the city of the first Athenians, nine thousand years ago, conformed in every detail to Socrates’s description of the ideal state, even though these earliest Athenians were real men and women. The story was told to him by his grandfather who heard it directly from his contemporary Solon, who wrote about it in a long poem. Solon is not a philosopher king but a Poet King, whose gifts in poetry, says Critias, would have equaled or surpassed the gifts of Homer and Hesiod, had he made it his central task.

Philosophy and poetry are distinct inventions. But each suffers by keeping the other at arm’s length.

With Timaeus and Critias, Plato places the Republic in a larger frame of artistic competition (with Socrates, Timaeus, and Critias as the competitors). Moreover, the priority of third-order poetic representations over second-order philosophical representations is acknowledged to be a possibility, and a more alive version of the Republic is reported to be available in a poem by the Poet-King Solon, who originated (or at least strongly supported, as Greg Nagy points out) the requirement that Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey be recited at the Panathenaea.

Further, the Republic’s second critique of poetry—that its meter seduces us away from rational judgment—is challenged by Timaeus’s account of the binding of mortal creatures. The Original Artificer gives the cosmos unity by an intricate, analogical binding of earth, air, water, and fire, as well as by mathematical ratios, but mortal creatures achieve unity only by an array of pegs that hold everything together. Whenever they are slightly or even greatly out of kilter, poetic meter is applied to bring them back into perfect alignment again. Meter repairs human souls.

So two of the most serious charges against poetry in the Republic each receive a serious challenge, and may be defeated altogether. The Kallynteria festival honored the goddess Athena by being a time of cleansing her temple. Conceivably Plato could have intended Timaeus and Critias as a palinode making amends for having spoken against poetry, much as Socrates in Phaedrus gives a palinode making amends for having spoken against love. An intellectual world bereft of poetry would be as damaged as one where the nonlover is preferred to the lover.

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The careless adage that Plato banished poetry should itself be banished. It is untrue. It wounds poetry by severing poetry from one of its greatest advocates. It wounds a public that disregards poetry by assuring them they suffer no deficit. And it deforms political philosophy by tempting its practitioners to steer clear of metaphor and myth, even when philosophy’s greatest contributions demonstrate the importance of meter, metaphor, and myth to powerful thinking.

Is it just a coincidence that the single best known page in the last fifty years of philosophy is a metaphor? John Rawls wrote principally in the prosaic style of analytical philosophy. But his most memorable contribution is the veil of ignorance, a compelling image of how to reason about justice in a way that gives equal attention to the good of each person.

The case of Rawls is the rule, not an exception. Hobbes’s Leviathan draws on a world-transforming metaphor drawn from the Book of Job: the state is like the great sea monster who tames human pride. Well into his eighties, Hobbes himself translated the 16,000 lines of The Iliad from the ancient Greek (not to mention the twenty-four books of The Odyssey) and foregrounded, more prominently than any other translation before or since, the dissent of Achilles. It is far from a coincidence that he, being steeped in such literature, had among his first principles the following: “If men will not obey the law, what is it that can make them? An army, you will say. But what shall make the army?”

Even if we ignore Locke’s Latin poems, we cannot ignore the stream of metaphors throughout his Second Treatise of Government—as when he distinguishes his conception of limited government from the absolutists who think “men are so foolish, that they take care to avoid what mischiefs may be done them by pole-cats, or foxes; but are content, nay, think it safety, to be devoured by lions.” Rousseau wrote a bestselling novel, Julie, and a popular opera, Le Devin Du Village; and works like Confessions, Emile, and The Social Contract are regarded as literary as well as philosophic masterpieces. Kant’s regard for the stature of aesthetic judgment is indicated by his decision to dedicate a treatise to the subject. Schiller urged that freedom was impossible without aesthetic education. The cascade continues through Hegel, Dewey, Sartre, Beauvoir, Wittgenstein.

Philosophy and poetry are distinct inventions. But each suffers by keeping the other at arm’s length. The fates of philosophical and poetic understanding are intertwined. They have a single history.

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We don’t know whether Plato and Socrates have had the chance to converse in the afterlife with Homer, Hesiod, Orpheus, and Museus. But last year, new technology able to decipher a set of disintegrating papyrus scrolls—in such fragile condition that they were previously unable to be read—brought to light new elements of a biography of Plato’s life and death written by the philosopher Philodemus. What they reveal, according to a philosopher who worked on the project, is that Plato is buried on the grounds of his Academy in Athens “in a garden in a private area, near the sacred shrine to the muses.”

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