the character is being formed and the desired impression is
more readily taken.

Quite true.

And shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales
which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds
ideas for the most part the very opposite of those which we should wish
them to have when they are grown up?

We cannot.

Then the first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of
fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good,
and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their
children the authorised ones only. Let them fashion the mind with such
tales, even more fondly than they mould the body with their hands; but
most of those which are now in use must be discarded.

Of what tales are you speaking? he said.

You may find a model of the lesser in the greater, I said; for they are
necessarily of the same type, and there is the same spirit in both of
them.

Very likely, he replied; but I do not as yet know what you would term
the greater.

Those, I said, which are narrated by Homer and Hesiod, and the rest of
the poets, who have ever been the great story-tellers of mankind.

But which stories do you mean, he said; and what fault do you find with
them?

A fault which is most serious, I said; the fault of telling a lie, and,
what is more, a bad lie.

But when is this fault committed?

Whenever an erroneous representation is made of the nature of gods and
heroes,--as when a painter paints a portrait not having the shadow of a
likeness to the original.

Yes, he said, that sort of thing is certainly very blameable; but what
are the stories which you mean?

First of all, I said, there was that greatest of all lies in high
places, which the poet told about Uranus, and which was a bad lie
too,--I mean what Hesiod says that Uranus did, and how Cronus retaliated
on him. The doings of Cronus, and the sufferings which in turn his son
inflicted upon him, even if they were true, ought certainly not to be
lightly told to young and thoughtless persons; if possible, they had
better be buried in silence. But if there is an absolute necessity
for their mention, a chosen few might hear them in a mystery, and
they should sacrifice not a common (Eleusinian) pig, but some huge and
unprocurable victim; and then the number of the hearers will be very few
indeed.

Why, yes, said he, those stories are extremely objectionable.

Yes,