Book 10: Poetry and the Myth of Er

Plato returns to a topic he opened in Book 3 — the place of poetry in the just city — now armed with the full theory of Forms. The argument cuts deeper than before. Imitation (mimesis) is three removes from reality. There is the Form of Bed (made by the god); the carpenter's bed (made by the craftsman, an image of the Form); and the painter's bed (made by the imitator, an image of the image). Poets imitate appearances of things, not the things themselves, and at the deepest level not the Forms that ground the things. They are professional fabricators of shadow-images.

Worse, tragic poetry — the highest-status art form in Athens — stirs the lower part of the soul. The audience weeps at Achilles's grief, fears with Oedipus, rages with Medea — and Plato thinks this rehearsal of unmastered passion makes the soul more vulnerable to passion in life. Reason, weakened by repeated indulgence in pity-and-terror, loses its grip on appetite and spirit. The poet is, on Plato's diagnosis, a teacher of bad psychology, even when (especially when) the poetry is beautiful.

Plato banishes most poetry from the kallipolis. He keeps hymns to the gods and praises of good men. He invites a defense — let philosophy and poetry have their old quarrel out, but on the philosophic ground that poetry is useful as well as pleasant. He does not retract. The exile stands.

The book then turns to the rewards of justice in this life and the next. Plato closes with the Myth of Er — one of the most strange and famous passages in the corpus. Er, a soldier killed in battle, returns to life 12 days later and reports what he saw of the afterlife. Souls are judged. The just go upward for 1,000 years of reward; the unjust go downward for 1,000 years of punishment. Tyrants are punished forever. Most souls return to a meadow and choose their next life from a great array of lives — animal and human, rich and poor, wise and foolish.

The choice depends on what the soul learned in the life just lived. Odysseus, who has drawn last lot, looks past the lives of kings and heroes and chooses an obscure life of a private citizen, content because he has remembered the cost of his suffering. The lesson is unambiguous: how you choose your next life depends on how you've prepared this one, and only philosophy — the long discipline of seeing through appearances to what is — equips the soul to choose well.

The Republic ends: "And so, Glaucon, the tale was saved and not lost. And it may save us, if we believe it; and we shall pass safely over the river Lethe and our souls will not be defiled. So if we are guided by me, believing that the soul is immortal and able to bear every evil and every good, we will hold ever to the upward way and follow justice with wisdom always and in every way."