Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/332

 3o8 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE try to excuse him by saying that when he spoke of poetry he was thinking of Chaeremon, and the sons of Carkinus. But lie was not. It is real poetry, it is Homer and .^schylus and himself that he turns against; and he would have, been disloyal to his philosophy if he had done otherwise. Plato had based his life on the belief that hard thinking can lead men to salvation ; that Truth and the Good somehow in the end coincide. He meant to work towards that end, come what might ; and if Poetry interfered, he must throw Poetry over- board. After the Republic she has almost gone ; the Sophistes, Politicus, Laws, know little of her, and even the myths become more abstract and didactic, except, possibly, that of Atlantis in the Critias. It is curious that Plato does not include his myths in his condemnation of poetry, since it was as poetry that he originally justified them. A divine vision in the Phcedo commissions Socrates just before his death to ' practise poetry ' (fxovaiKi]) ; the oracle from Delphi in the Apology proclaims Socrates the wisest of men, because he knows his own ignorance. Both vision and oracle are apparently fictions : they are Plato's way of claiming a divine sanction for his two-sided Socrates, the inspired Questioner and the inspired Story-teller.^ It is in later life also that Plato turns seriously to politics. A younger generation of philosophers was then growing up, the future Cynics, Stoics, Epicureans, who turned utterly away from the State, and devoted themselves to the individual soul. Once Plato was ready to preach some such doctrine himself : he had begun life in reaction against the great political period. But he was, after all, a child of Periclean ^ Schanz, He7-i)i. xxix. 597.