A Long Post About Plato and Homer and Myth in General: In Plato's Republic, Socrates spends considerable time proving the destructive power of men like Homer on the human soul. What did he mean by this? And was he right? The first question has a complex answer. Socrates does not condemn Homer or epic poetry whole cloth. What he condemns are the aspects of Homer that are, as he says, imitative. What is that? Imitative poetry (or music) is performed by the bard as if the bard himself is the character he is portraying. It is not simple third-person narrative; it is first-person acting. It is, in this way, a lesser image of an already lesser image of the ideal. He likens it to a painter painting a couch. Is the painter actually painting a couch? No, for you cannot sit in the couch that he painted. He is, in his picture, imitating the couch as it looks. Conversely, a couch-maker, in his office of couch-making, tries to imitate the couch as it is. This, the imitation of the ideal form carried out by the couch-maker, is not the type of imitation that Socrates condemns. The imitative poet is like the painter, so Socrates argues. He pretends to be a general, a warrior, a statesman, perhaps even a god. But he is none of these things. Even the actual statesman, again speaking Socrates' language, is only "imitating" justice as it actually is in Form. The poet imitating the statesman is therefore pretending to be an image of the form. That makes him a lesser image of a lesser image. That makes him dangerous. Why? Well, he is dangerous first to himself. If the good life consists of making friends with oneself (and Socrates says it does), factions in the individual soul cannot be tolerated. Imitation of this type, though, willingly invites factions into the soul by forcing the soul to go on mute while the poet pretends to be what he is not. This makes it nearly impossible, given enough time, for the poet to know and befriend himself. But he is also dangerous to society. Why? Well, an imitative poet assumes an audience watching. an audience watching presumably cares what the poet has to say. Thus, the poet can educate the audience in the subjects they imitate. But since they are imitating, they are only teaching the audience the thing as it looks, not as it is. That means the audience will be misled. What's more, if the poet is dependent on the audience to support him, he will make sure this "education" is already agreeable to their souls. if their souls are corrupt though—and souls informed by imitative art are corrupted—what is agreeable to them will be more and more disagreeable to the truth. This forces the imitative poet into a stance of appealing to the less noble, and eventually least noble, aspects of the soul. Instead of pulling the audience up to higher virtue, they indulge the audience’s desire to wallow in passionate vice. And again, they must do this because they depend on audience to continue their imitative work. So what does this have to do with Homer? To reiterate, Socrates does not condemn all of Homer. He only condemns those aspects of Homer which are imitative. Specifically, however, he fears the influence of Homer (despite very much liking his music) because Homer was the "educator of all Greece." Surely the educator of all Greece must be careful to educate in a good way. But imitative art cannot do this. Hence the problem. Instead of rising above the childish rage of Achilles, the audience sees him as the greatest warrior hero. Instead of rising above the hubris of Odysseus, the audience delights in and admires his cunning over all. Homer, as the educator of Greece, has taught Greece to be passionate beasts whose spiritedness is governed by concupiscence and not wisdom. Or so this is the accusation from Socrates. But is he right? Meaning: Is he right both in his condemnation of imitative art and his assessment of Homer? Overall, we should affirm he is generally right in his condemnation of imitative art because of the proofs we see in nature today. But we deny that myth falls into this base form of imitation. There must be a distinction made between the imitator as Socrates defines him and Homer, for the two artists achieve entirely different outcomes. And no, those outcomes cannot be defined by the takeaways of a foolish audience. A work must be judged in light of its proper use and not in light of abuse, whether purposeful or accidental. Here we also must note something ironic. Some might read this and think, "Wait a minute! Plato's dialogues are imitative! He condemns imitation as he himself participates in it? Doesn’t he imitate Socrates in the Republic?” Not exactly. Plato uses dialectic as the tool by which man ascends to truth as it is. Dialectic, distinct from imitation, does not construct an image of truth as it looks, nor even an image of truth as it is. Rather, it just leads to truth. So Plato is not really breaking his own rules. But back to the issue at hand. In answer to his assessment of Homer, we must say he is wrong because he gets Homer's purpose wrong. No myth is meant to be the educator of a nation in such practical matters as finance, statecraft, or even external religion. No true myth is meant to tickle the fancies of the passions or concupiscence without a larger and more virtuous end in mind (simple fiction is the genre for that and even then, no larger aim for an author is rare). Myth is meant to do something far deeper: it is meant to communicate the ethos of a people to the people that come after them. I understand this is stated without proof, but that is for a later time. For now, intuit with me. What is the value of Homer? It is not in his depiction of military tactics. It is not his depiction of politics. It is not his depiction of the gods as if that is what they are. It is not even his ability to press upon the passions of man. The value of Homer is not his making Achilles commendable, or Odysseus relatable, or Hector likable. The point is not for him to press on the most bestial buttons of the human soul just to appease a simple-minded audience. The value of Homer is his ability to communicate the fullness of the Greek ethos. The good and the bad, the rich and the wanting, the wise and the foolish parts all come into a single narrative in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. When we read them, we walk away having gone down into the depths of the beginnings of the Western psyche to learn the ethos of our forefathers. Myth, at the level of the soul, answers the question: What did I come from? At least in earthly terms. This is largely what makes myth myth. You do not learn the ethos of a single man when you read it. You learn, via a story which transcends the merely literal, the ethos of the people that produced that man. This means that Homer is actually much closer to Plato than he is to the painter. Plato is teaching wisdom as it is. It is my firm belief that Homer is crafting an image of the Greek ethos “as it is” (to use Socratic language) and giving it to us. Not as it appears; as it is. It is an image we can live with and be formed by, however abstract it remains. In fact, if you are a Westerner, you have been formed by it. I know this is another assertion that requires further proof. But again, for another time. For now I will just positively state. Plato takes us up out of the cave and toward the light. Homer admittedly drags us downward, but not so we can be kept in the cave. He drags us downward in katabasis. He shows us the formation of the Greek soul in life and death and life again (consider how Odysseus changes after he comes back from Hades) so that we can press forward, having understood and made friends with where we came from. He is appealing, many times, to baser passions. But not so you can indulge in them, so you can see them and see how they worked in the souls of the people you came from. Take Achilles for example, does he only ever appeal to our rage and vanity? No, he too calls us up when he confesses his folly to Odysseus in Hades. If Achilles would rather be a slave on earth than stuck in death, how should the reader retroactively assess his life? He is not crafting Achilles using words as tools. He is crafting one aspect of the Greek (and Western) ethos using Achilles as an archetype to that end (an archetype who, in accordance with the genre of myth, likely had a reality somewhere in history). Thus, myth communicates the ethos of the people who made it, but its pedagogy does not stop there. It also contains moral instruction for where the ethos ought to evolve. But it does not do this with concupiscence alone or spiritedness alone. It does this with an appeal to the soul in its entirety. This helps us have a root in ourselves. This assists us in befriending our own souls and thus is in-expendable to the good life. It is not the end, but it is an unavoidable step on the road upward to the light. If an audience misunderstands, that is not the fault of Homer. Myth is a higher form of art. Much like how Plato can be misunderstood and misused, Homer can be as well. The abuse of a thing neither nullifies nor determines its proper use. Finally, I appeal to Socrates himself. In Book X of the Republic, he tells the Myth of Er. He abides by his own rules and does not imitate, but it is meaningful that he must use the vehicle of myth to communicate his point. In that myth, who is the soul who picks the good life from the pile available to him? It is Odysseus, the hero of Homer. Socrates appeals to Homer to show us what the life of journeying toward the good truth might look like, and what the disposition of one who would learn from that life might be. Odysseus, who Socrates accuses of corrupting the youth of Greece, is the one who is left uncorrupted at the end. Taking Homer’s surviving works as a whole, it is Odysseus who stands out as the main character. He is crafty, all’s one to him, he is remarkably cunning and silver-tongued, he is the man of many faces, and he always has an answer. In many ways he is admirable in a worldly sense. In many ways he is horrible in both earthly and heavenly senses. But by the end of the story, what is he? He is what he claims he always wanted to be in the first place: a husband and a father and a simple ruler of his simple realm. Does the journey of Odysseus, immortalized by Homer, not teach us a similar form of virtue that Socrates also points us toward? Socrates confirms it does when he has Odysseus choose the good life in his Myth of Er. Homer does not lay it out in such explicit words. But then again, neither does Plato. Homer with Odysseus, just like Plato with Socrates, take men to truth by the way of words. The paths look different. The words are of a different sort. But the similarity remains nonetheless. But here we come to an end of this very brief survey of an answer that deserves a much longer treatment. This is why Homer must be admitted into the city, and into the soul.