now, 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. But human poets are fond of introducing
this sort of inconsistent mixture, and so make themselves ridiculous in
the eyes of those who, as Orpheus says, 'are ripe for true pleasure.'
The experienced see all this confusion, and yet the poets go on and make
still further havoc by separating the rhythm and the figure of the dance
from the melody, setting bare words to metre, and also separating the
melody and the rhythm from the words, using the lyre or the flute alone.
For when there are no words, it is very difficult to recognize the
meaning of the harmony and rhythm, or to see that any worthy object is
imitated by them. And we must acknowledge that all this sort of thing,
which aims only at swiftness and smoothness and a brutish noise, and
uses the flute and the lyre not as the mere accompaniments of the
dance and song, is exceedingly coarse and tasteless. The use of either
instrument, when unaccompanied, leads to every sort of irregularity and
trickery. This is all rational enough. But we are considering not how
our choristers, who are from thirty to fifty years of age, and may be
over fifty, are not to use the Muses, but how they are to use them. And
the considerations which we have urged seem to show in what way these
fifty years' old choristers who are to sing, may be expected to be
better trained