d; fierce to foes but gentle to friends, like that true
philosopher, the dog, to whom knowledge is the test. The known are
friends, the unknown foes--knowledge begets gentleness.

So our guardians must be trained to knowledge; we must educate them.
Music and gymnastic, our national intellectual and physical training,
must be taught. Literature comes first, and really we teach things that
are not true before we teach things that are true--fables before facts.
But over these we must exercise a rigid censorship, excluding what is
essentially false.

We must have no stories which attribute harmful doings to the gods. God
must be represented as He is--the author of good always, of evil never;
also as having in him no variableness, neither shadow of turning. God
has no need of disguises. The lie in the soul--essential falsehood--is
to Him abhorrent, and He has no need of such deceptions as may be
innocent or even laudable for men. God must be shown always as utterly
true.

Similarly, we must not have stories which inspire dread of death; no
Achilles saying in the under-world that it were better to be a slave in
the flesh than Lord of the Shades. And again, no heroes--and gods still
less--giving way to frantic lamentations and uncontrolled emotions, even
uncontrolled laughter. Truth must be inculcated; medicinal untruths, so
to speak, are the prerogative of our rulers alone, and must be permitted
to no one else. Temperance, which means self-control and obedience to
authority, is essential, and is not always characteristic of Homer's
gods and heroes! We must exclude a long list of most unedifying passages
on this score. As for pictures of the afflictions of the righteous and
the prosperity of the unjust, we must wait, as we have not yet defined
justice. We turn to the poetical forms in which the stories should be
embodied.

The possible forms are the simply descriptive, the imitative, and the
mixture of the two: narrative drama, and narrative mixed with dialogue.
Our guardians ought to eschew imitation altogether, or at least to
imitate only the good and noble. The act of imitating an evil character
is demoralising, just as no self-respecting person will imitate the
lower animals, and so on. Imitation must be restricted within the
narrowest practicable limits.

But who are to be our actual rulers? The best of the elders, whose
firmness and consistency have stood the test of temptation. To them we
transfer the title of gua