But music, like all art, must be truly imitative, and imitative of what is true and good.

Art and morality agree in rejecting pleasure as the criterion of good.

True art is inseparable from the highest and most ennobling ideas.

Plato only recognizes the identity of pleasure and good when the pleasure is of the higher kind.
He is the enemy of 'songs without words,' which he supposes to have some confusing or enervating effect on the mind of the hearer; and he is also opposed to the modern degeneracy of the drama, which he would probably have illustrated, like Aristophanes, from Euripides and Agathon.

From this passage may be gathered a more perfect conception of art than from any other of Plato's writings.