In the first place, will not any one who is thus mellowed be more ready and less ashamed to sing--I do not say before a large audience, but before a moderate company; nor yet among strangers, but among his familiars, and, as we have often said, to chant, and to enchant?
CLEINIAS: He will be far more ready.
ATHENIAN: There will be no impropriety in our using such a method of persuading them to join with us in song.
CLEINIAS: None at all.
ATHENIAN: And what strain will they sing, and what muse will they hymn?
The strain should clearly be one suitable to them.
CLEINIAS: Certainly.
ATHENIAN: And what strain is suitable for heroes?
Shall they sing a choric strain?
CLEINIAS: Truly, Stranger, we of Crete and Lacedaemon know no strain other than that which we have learnt and been accustomed to sing in our chorus.
ATHENIAN: I dare say; for you have never acquired the knowledge of the most beautiful kind of song, in your military way of life, which is modelled after the camp, and is not like that of dwellers in cities; and you have your young men herding and feeding together like young colts.
No one takes his own individual colt and drags him away from his fellows against his will, raging and foaming, and gives him a groom to attend to him alone, and trains and rubs him down privately, and gives him the qualities in education which will make him not only a good soldier, but also a governor of a state and of cities.

Such an one, as we said at first, would be a greater warrior than he of whom Tyrtaeus sings; and he would honour courage everywhere, but always as the fourth, and not as the first part of virtue, either in individuals or states.
CLEINIAS: Once more, Stranger, I must complain that you depreciate our lawgivers.
ATHENIAN: Not intentionally, if at all, my good friend; but whither the argument leads, thither let us follow; for if there be indeed some strain of song more beautiful than that of the choruses or the public theatres, I should like to impart it to those who, as we say, are ashamed of these, and want to have the best.
CLEINIAS: Certainly.
ATHENIAN: When things have an accompanying charm, either the best thing in them is this very charm, or there is some rightness or utility possessed by them;--for example, I should say that eating and drinking, and the use of food in general, have an accompanying charm which we call pleasure; but that this rightness and utility is just the healthfulness of the things served up to us, which is their true rightness.
CLEINIAS: Just so.
ATHENIAN: Thus, too, I should say that learning has a certain accompanying charm which is the pleasure; but that the right and the profitable, the good and the noble, are qualities which the truth gives to it.
CLEINIAS: Exactly.
ATHENIAN: And so in the imitative arts--if they succeed in making likenesses, and are accompanied by pleasure, may not their works be said to have a charm?
CLEINIAS: Yes.
ATHENIAN: But equal proportions, whether of quality or quantity, and not pleasure, speaking generally, would give them truth or rightness.
CLEINIAS: Yes.
ATHENIAN: Then that only can be rightly judged by the standard of pleasure, which makes or furnishes no utility or truth or likeness, nor on the other hand is productive of any hurtful quality, but exists solely for the sake of the accompanying charm; and the term 'pleasure' is most appropriately applied to it when these other qualities are absent.
CLEINIAS: You are speaking of harmless pleasure, are you not?
ATHENIAN: Yes; and this I term amusement, when doing neither harm nor good in any degree worth speaking of.
CLEINIAS: Very true.
ATHENIAN: Then, if such be our principles, we must assert that imitation is not to be judged of by pleasure and false opinion; and this is true of all equality, for the equal is not equal or the symmetrical symmetrical, because somebody thinks or likes something, but they are to be judged of by the standard of truth, and by no other whatever.
CLEINIAS: Quite true.
ATHENIAN: Do we not regard all music as representative and imitative?
CLEINIAS: Certainly.
ATHENIAN: Then, when any one says that music is to be judged of by pleasure, his doctrine cannot be admitted; and if there be any music of which pleasure is the criterion, such music is not to be sought out or deemed to have any real excellence, but only that other kind of music which is an imitation of the good.
CLEINIAS: Very true.
ATHENIAN: And those who seek for the best kind of song and music ought not to seek for that which is pleasant, but for that which is true; and the truth of imitation consists, as we were saying, in rendering the thing imitated according to quantity and quality.
CLEINIAS: Certainly.
ATHENIAN: And every one will admit that musical compositions are all imitative and representative.

Will not poets and spectators and actors all agree in this?
CLEINIAS: They will.
ATHENIAN: Surely then he who would judge correctly must know what each composition is; for if he does not know what is the character and meaning of the piece, and what it represents, he will never discern whether the intention is true or false.
CLEINIAS: Certainly not.
ATHENIAN: And will he who does not know what is true be able to distinguish what is good and bad?
My statement is not very clear; but perhaps you will understand me better if I put the matter in another way.
CLEINIAS: How?
ATHENIAN: There are ten thousand likenesses of objects of sight?
CLEINIAS: Yes.
ATHENIAN: And can he who does not know what the exact object is which is imitated, ever know whether the resemblance is truthfully executed?
I mean, for example, whether a statue has the proportions of a body, and the true situation of the parts; what those proportions are, and how the parts fit into one another in due order; also their colours and conformations, or whether this is all confused in the execution: do you think that any one can know about this, who does not know what the animal is which has been imitated?
CLEINIAS: Impossible.
ATHENIAN: But even if we know that the thing pictured or sculptured is a man, who has received at the hand of the artist all his proper parts and colours and shapes, must we not also know whether the work is beautiful or in any respect deficient in beauty?
CLEINIAS: If this were not required, Stranger, we should all of us be judges of beauty.
ATHENIAN: Very true; and may we not say that in everything imitated, whether in drawing, music, or any other art, he who is to be a competent judge must possess three things;--he must know, in the first place, of what the imitation is; secondly, he must know that it is true; and thirdly, that it has been well executed in words and melodies and rhythms?
CLEINIAS: Certainly.
ATHENIAN: Then let us not faint in discussing the peculiar difficulty of music.

Music is more celebrated than any other kind of imitation, and therefore requires the greatest care of them all.

For if a man makes a mistake here, he may do himself the greatest injury by welcoming evil dispositions, and the mistake may be very difficult to discern, because the poets are artists very inferior in character to the Muses themselves, who would never fall into the monstrous error of assigning to the words of men the gestures and songs of women; nor after combining the melodies with the gestures of freemen would they add on the rhythms of slaves and men of the baser sort; nor, beginning with the rhythms and gestures of freemen, would they assign to them a melody or words which are of an opposite character; nor would they mix up the voices and sounds of animals and of men and instruments, and every other sort of noise, as if they were all one.