st the irrational impulses of the masses of its own citizens.
Normally, the latter will be their chief duty, the enforcement of the
decrees of the philosopher-rulers upon the masses. The masses will
engage themselves in trade, commerce, and agriculture. Both the other
ranks are prohibited from soiling their fingers with trade or
agriculture, upon which Plato, as a Greek aristocrat, looked down with
unbounded contempt. To what rank a citizen belongs is not determined
by birth, nor by individual choice. No individual can choose his own
profession. This will be determined by the officers of the State, who
will base their decision, however, upon the disposition and
capabilities of the individual. As they have also to decide the
numbers required for each rank, the magistrates also control the birth
of children. Parents cannot have children when they wish. The sanction
of the State is required.

Since the end of the State is the virtue of the citizens, this
involves the destruction of whatever is evil and the encouragement of
whatever is good. To compass the destruction of evil, the children of
bad parents, or offspring not sanctioned by the State, will be
destroyed. Weak and sickly children will also not be allowed to live.
The positive encouragement of good involves the education of the
citizens by the State. Children from their earliest years do not
belong to their parents, but to the State. They are, therefore, at
once removed from the custody of their parents, and transferred to
State nurseries. Since the parents are to have no {229} property nor
interest in them, stringent means are adopted to see that, after
removal to the public nurseries, parents shall never again be able to
recognize their own children. All the details of the educational
curriculum are decreed by the State. Poetry, for example, is only
allowed in an emasculated form. Of the three kinds, epic, dramatic,
and lyric, the two former are banished from the State altogether,
because, in the base example of the immorality of the gods, which they
depict, they are powerful instruments in the propagation of evil. Only
lyric poetry is allowed, and that under strict supervision. The
subject, the form, even the metre, will be prescribed by the proper
authorities. Poetry is not recognized as valuable in itself, but only
as an educative moral influence. All poems, therefore, must strictly
inculcate virtue.

It is, in Plato's opinion, intolerable that the individua