Poetry banished, and the myth of Er

Socrates returns to the question he raised in Book Three and pushes it further: poetry must be banished from the just city. He has two arguments. First, the metaphysical one: a painter paints a bed; the carpenter makes the bed; the Form of the bed is the real thing the carpenter copies. The painter is therefore three steps from reality — an imitator of an imitator. The poet, similarly, imitates men's actions and appearances rather than understanding them. Imitations of imitations are at best entertaining, never instructive.

Second, the ethical argument, which Socrates considers the more serious. Poetry trains the soul to feel what it should not feel. We weep over Achilles's grief in the Iliad, and the part of us that should be governed by reason — the part that, in our own grief, would not break down — is exercised against itself. The tragic poets make us small. The comic poets make us spiteful. Lyric poetry makes us self-indulgent. The just city will banish them all and keep only hymns to the gods and praises of good men. Socrates says he is sorry; he loves Homer; the argument is the argument.

Then the dialogue closes with myth. A soldier named Er is killed in battle. Twelve days later, on his funeral pyre, he comes back to life and reports what he saw. Souls of the dead arrive at a place of judgment, are sent up to heaven or down to be punished, and after a thousand years return to choose their next lives. Er watches them choose. A wise old soul, exhausted by his last just life, picks a life of tyranny without reading the fine print. A foolish young soul picks a beautiful life that turns out to be cursed. Odysseus's soul, having been to the bottom of grief, picks the life of an ordinary private man and is satisfied at last. The choice is ours, Plato says. We should choose well. The Republic ends.