ad therefore better defer the enquiry.

The subjects of poetry have been sufficiently treated; next follows
style. Now all poetry is a narrative of events past, present, or to
come; and narrative is of three kinds, the simple, the imitative, and
a composition of the two. An instance will make my meaning clear.
The first scene in Homer is of the last or mixed kind, being partly
description and partly dialogue. But if you throw the dialogue into the
'oratio obliqua,' the passage will run thus: The priest came and prayed
Apollo that the Achaeans might take Troy and have a safe return if
Agamemnon would only give him back his daughter; and the other Greeks
assented, but Agamemnon was wroth, and so on--The whole then becomes
descriptive, and the poet is the only speaker left; or, if you omit the
narrative, the whole becomes dialogue. These are the three styles--which
of them is to be admitted into our State? 'Do you ask whether tragedy
and comedy are to be admitted?' Yes, but also something more--Is it not
doubtful whether our guardians are to be imitators at all? Or rather,
has not the question been already answered, for we have decided that one
man cannot in his life play many parts, any more than he can act both
tragedy and comedy, or be rhapsodist and actor at once? Human nature
is coined into very small pieces, and as our guardians have their own
business already, which is the care of freedom, they will have enough
to do without imitating. If they imitate they should imitate, not any
meanness or baseness, but the good only; for the mask which the actor
wears is apt to become his face. We cannot allow men to play the parts
of women, quarrelling, weeping, scolding, or boasting against the
gods,--least of all when making love or in labour. They must not
represent slaves, or bullies, or cowards, drunkards, or madmen, or
blacksmiths, or neighing horses, or bellowing bulls, or sounding rivers,
or a raging sea. A good or wise man will be willing to perform good and
wise actions, but he will be ashamed to play an inferior part which he
has never practised; and he will prefer to employ the descriptive style
with as little imitation as possible. The man who has no self-respect,
on the contrary, will imitate anybody and anything; sounds of nature
and cries of animals alike; his whole performance will be imitation of
gesture and voice. Now in the descriptive style there are few changes,
but in the dramatic there are a great many. Po